Comes the Piper
by christinaking
Summary: We are, at the end, a sum of our promises made, our promises kept and the promises we break when we need to. (Continuation of Minotaur/Of Seafarers and Moonlight)
1. Chapter 1

_A/N - This is a sequel to Minotaur and Of Seafarers and Moonlight._

 _I kind of set this one up with a few things in the past two stories, but then I hesitated to write it. Alas, the story must come out of my head and onto the page. I think I must have been a masochist in my past life._

 _If you didn't read Minotaur, you'll probably be totally lost without the backstory. We won't be delving as deeply into the darker situations like that story, though._

 _Here we go..._

* * *

 _On day four hundred fifty-five, Marietta found me. I'd spent over a year completely alone, going over my entire life in my mind while I sat in a small, mostly unfurnished house outside of Queens. I had little money, no job history and no education. I ate greasy food from street vendors, I didn't cut my hair, I didn't shave, I rarely bathed._

 _I had this house that no one supposedly knew about._

 _I had a fake ID and and a stack of cash that was dwindling._

 _I had the book Bobby used to read to me when I was little._

 _Before Bobby, I was named Tim. I lived in Peckham, a rough neighborhood in London. My mother's name was Marie, and she had more children than she could take care of, so I took care of myself. When I was eight, a woman took me off the streets and delivered me to a man. I learned much later that his name was Adrian. Back then, everyone around me called him Master._

 _I was with him for two months. There were other children there. The first time Adrian raped me, he was brutal and it was excruciating. I cried and screamed and threw up. By the third time, I didn't cry or throw up anymore. None of us did. There was a little girl there with me. Her name was Marietta, and Adrian liked her best of all. He was gentle with her._

 _She was nine, a year older than me. She had fiery red, curly hair and sparkling green eyes. At night, she slept with her arms around me. "If you believe it's not bad, it won't be," she told me._

 _A few weeks later, there was an auction. I remember Marietta waving to me as I was led away from the stage after it was over. I was bought by a man named Peter. He told me I was to be a gift for his brother, Bobby. He flew me to New York. Bobby was waiting for me in a nice house with a room and bathroom of my own. There were books and clothing and toys - I'd never had so many things before. There were no windows. He told me my new name was Embry._

 _Bobby was nice to me that first day. He played with me and fed me. When the clock said it was eight o'clock, Bobby said it was time to read me a bedtime story. He pulled a picture book off the shelf. The Pied Piper of Hamelin. I sat on his lap and he had me turn the pages while his hands went under my pajama top, touching my skin._

" _If I believe it's not bad, it won't be," I told myself in my mind over and over._

 _When the story was finished, Bobby whispered, "Time to pay the piper, Embry." And he led me to the little bed in my room. That's what he called it. Bobby would play with me, he would feed me, he bought me things. And at night, it was time to pay the piper._

 _I saw Marietta once a year, at the auctions, until I was fifteen. That year, she wasn't there, and by then I'd started figuring some things out. Sometimes kids I saw year after year were no longer there with their owners, and I knew they were probably dead. It was one way they all had a hold on us. There was the unwritten rule: Comply or die._

 _By the time I was eleven, all it took was Bobby reciting a couple of lines from the Pied Piper, and I'd get an erection._

 _By the time I was thirteen, I no longer slept in a windowless room in the basement, but in Bobby's room every night._

 _By the time I was sixteen, Bobby was made an official member of "the family."_

 _When I was twenty, and muscular and could be completely trusted, I was allowed to help Bobby and Peter acquire the children for their auctions. I would do anything for Bobby by that point, so when he ordered me to kidnap a small child, I did. And when I was ordered to kill a child, I did. And when Bobby told me he loved me, I told him I loved him, too._

 _When we delivered the FBI agent to the safehouse in Austria, Bobby told me to go home. He told me to keep an eye on things in New York since it was all so dangerous this time after Peter took the FBI agent. I wouldn't be at the auction that year._

 _What I did get was a breathless call from Bobby the night of the auction. "The floorboard under my bed. Get what's there and go to the house in Queens," he ordered. Then I heard a gunshot, and then nothing._

 _With my body shaking, I went to the bedroom I'd shared with Bobby for over fifteen years. I pushed the bed away and found the loose floorboard. Inside was a stack of hundred dollar bills and an ID for me. And the Pied Piper of Hamelin, it's cover worn and the pages yellowed._

 _I spent eighteen years with Bobby. He was all I knew, and his orders were my life. I didn't know how to live without his direction. So I didn't live. I hid in the house most of the time and trembled any time I went outside. I learned from newspapers that the whole family, besides Adrian, was dead. Inside, I died, too._

 _I spent over a year contemplating killing myself, but could never bring myself to do it. I didn't know how to do anything without being told. And then Marietta showed up at my door one day._

" _Timmy," she whispered when I opened the door. At first I didn't know who she was talking to, and then I remembered that was the name I introduced myself with back when we were children. Her hair was still red and curly, and her eyes were still their brilliant green, but she looked older. Far older than me, like her years had been harder than mine._

" _I thought you were dead," I said as I let her in._

 _She shook her head. "No. I should be, but Adrian broke the rules for me. He hid me away instead of having me killed."_

 _She looked around the place and then looked sadly at me. "Go take a shower. Shave. I'll have to cut your hair. Get cleaned up. We have work to do."_

 _I wanted to ask her a million questions. What work? How did you find me? Is anyone else like us still alive that hasn't gone back to their families?_

 _But my body, so long used to moving and breathing and eating with directives, only took her orders. I turned towards the bathroom to take a shower and she followed me in. She sat on the toilet seat while I undressed and stepped in the stall. There was no embarrassment for me. I was used to anyone and everyone seeing my body and touching me._

 _As the warm water washed over me, I finally found my voice. "What work?" I asked._

" _Adrian's still alive, but barely. Prison has been awful for him. He wants revenge. He's our true master, and we're going to give him that satisfaction before he dies."_

 _My body froze. I didn't know what revenge could possibly look like, and it scared me. In all of my days of solitude, the one conclusion I came to was that I didn't want to hurt anyone ever again. But I didn't know how to function without doing the bidding of someone else, and just having her there telling me what to do was a relief after over a year of numbness._

 _And I understood. It was time for someone else to pay the piper._

" _I'll help you, Marietta," I said robotically as I reached for the bar of soap._

 _The door to the shower opened and she was there, naked in front of me. "Call me Mistress," she said as she raked her nails roughly down my chest._

* * *

It's almost blinding here in its beauty. The small cottage Derek rented is painted a vibrant purple. Beyond the front porch is an expanse of rich, green lawn that gives way to white sand and then the brilliant blue ocean that seems to stretch to eternity and meld with the sky.

The water is warm and gentle and the coral reefs are full of colorful fish. I could spend hours out on the water in snorkel gear. I _have_ spent hours out here, letting the water gently rock me while I gaze upon fish that seem almost unreal with their bright hues.

When Derek first presented me with a wrapped box on our first wedding anniversary on August twenty-third, I opened it to find a black bikini and two plane tickets to the Bahamas. I didn't know what to think at first - not about the bikini, which I couldn't imagine wearing in public at my age and with my body so altered after pregnancy - and not about the plane tickets for two, which meant we'd be leaving Leon and Rory behind.

I stared at the dates on the printed itinerary. Five nights. Could we really be gone for five nights without the kids? I couldn't imagine it. Night time was all of us piled on our bed, reading stories to Leon before Derek walked him to his own bed for the night. Night time was the quiet moments I got with Rory, breastfeeding her before putting her crib at night. And mornings were feeding her again, just as dawn was beginning to break in the sky. They were the only two times a day she was interested in breastfeeding anymore as she approached her first birthday. Her days were too busy with crawling and pulling up and babbling and exploring her world, and she was quite content with a sippy cup that she could drink from intermittently between new discoveries.

I held the bikini between my fingers and looked at Derek and he looked at me, biting his lower lip in uncertainty, while his eyes shined hopefully. "We never got a honeymoon," he said. "Desiree said she'd fly here to help my mom and your dad out with the kids. Plus, it's the perfect time with our jobs."

He was right on that account. It _was_ the perfect time when it came to our jobs. We were in the middle of a changing of the guards at our house. After over a year working part time for the DOJ, Derek's job was going full time after Labor Day. And I'd resigned from my position at the Department of Defense and taken the State Department exam, where I'd be working as a translator part time. It was my turn to be home more with the kids, and I was looking forward to it. But none of that would start up until the beginning of September.

Looking in his eyes, I quickly rationalized the trip. Leon would be absolutely fine, and I wouldn't lose anything with Rory. I could pump on vacation to keep my milk going, and Fran would cuddle her and give her a bottle when I was gone. We had a separate refrigerator in the garage at that point, and a stockpile of breastmilk in the freezer out there. So much that I'd actually donated quite a bit. And Derek and I never had had an opportunity like this.

"OK," I said to him with a smile.

His eyes lit up even more and he stopped biting his lip. "Really?" he asked, slightly surprised that I'd agreed so quickly.

"Yes," I said and laughed at the look on this face. "Let's go."

I sat up on my knees and leaned forward to kiss him. "OK about going, not about the bikini," I murmured against his lips.

He laughed. "We'll see, Em."

Three days later, we boarded a plane to Nassau.

Relaxation suited us in a way I hadn't anticipated. We did no schedules and spontaneity well. Every morning, Derek took pleasure in coating my body with coconut scented sunscreen, which typically delayed our departure from the cottage for a considerable amount of time. And every evening, he took pleasure in helping me wash off our daily activities in the jacuzzi tub. In my mind, our trip will always be remembered by the the bright colors outside, and the harmonious contrast in color of his hands against my skin when we had no place to be except where we were.

We ate when we were hungry, and we drank what we felt like when we felt like it. There was no morning or afternoon or night here - just an expanse of time that was all our own. There were surprisingly few hours of actual sleep. The hours we actually slumbered felt like more than what they were in reality: One hour sleeping next to Derek fully naked again felt like three hours to my circadian rhythm.

The only time the clock mattered to me was a couple of times a day when I'd take a few moments to pump to keep up my dwindling milk supply. And even that didn't detract from our time together. Derek would sit behind me on my bed, rubbing my back while the whir of the breast pump hummed around the small space.

Last night, we went to the Atlantis resort for dinner. After, Derek asked me if I wanted to hit the casino and I raised an eyebrow at him and smirked.

"What?" he laughed.

"Do you want to go to play or do you want to go to look around?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Whatever you want. Why?"

"You've never seen me play blackjack," I replied with a sly smile. He hadn't. The one night the team was off duty in Vegas so many years ago, I watched Derek with a throng of women around him at a Craps table and drank myself silly from the confines of a dark lounge until I could no longer think about why I was jealous.

"And?" he asked.

"Well, you find me a blackjack table with a three deck shoe or less, and the odds are no longer in the favor of the house," I said with a smile, my heart already pumping with anticipation. When it came to things like counting cards, I could probably give Spencer Reid a run for his money.

"I think I'd like to see this," said Derek with one hand on my lower back as he guided me towards the casino.

What Derek witnessed was me rapidly turning two hundred dollars in chips into over three thousand.

With a huge stack of chips in front of me, he leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, "Ever made love on a bed covered in cash?"

That pretty much ended any interest I had in the game. We stood. We cashed in my chips for twenty dollar bills. And we scattered them on the bed of the cottage last night, laughing as our naked bodies rolled around on the bed. I'm pretty sure we didn't collect it all this morning. I'm pretty sure the housekeeping staff at the cottage is going to hit the motherload when we check out tomorrow.

I laugh at the memory, the sound echoing in my snorkel tube. I'm wearing the black bikini on our last day here, finally giving in to Derek's wishes. It doesn't look bad on me, from a distance. Up close in the mirror, the only things I can see are my stretch marks from pregnancy and a five-year-old scar on my abdomen, but I'm really beyond caring anymore. The past four days have been magical, and the only person I care about is Derek. And when I came out of the cottage in my bikini this morning, his face was enough for me to forget about every flaw on my body.

I've been out here in the water for about an hour now and I'm hungry. I propel my body away from the coral reefs and then push up on the soft sand to get myself in a standing position. I take the awkward steps in my flippers, lifting my legs high, and so concentrated on my movements that I don't see Derek there in his swim trunks, sitting on the water's edge. His voice startles me.

"You are a vision in snorkel gear," he says. "A goddess in flippers."

I laugh and start pulling my gear off, but when I take in his face, I see he's not kidding.

"Lunch?" I ask him, my stomach growling slightly.

"I made sandwiches," he says. "They're in the cottage."

I nod and reach a hand out to him, helping him stand up. We make our way to the cottage, flippers and snorkel mask dangling in one hand while my other is clasped around Derek's. "I can't believe this is our last day here," I say as we make our way in the door.

He turns on me then. He turns and pushes me against the cottage door. At first, all I can see are the sandwiches on the little counter of the kitchenette, but the hunger in my stomach quickly gives way to a different kind of hunger as Derek's tongue makes its way from my collar bone to my ear, savoring my sea salt skin.

I could ask him to stop. I could say, "After we eat." But I don't, because that's all it's taken with him on this vacation. One touch of his lips on my skin and any banal needs my body might have - food, water, sleep - become a distant memory.

His skin is hot from the sun, but my body is still damp from the water. We are the perfect contrast as his warm chest pushes against the wet top of my swimsuit. I'm wondering where he might move me. The bed? The floor? The small table in the corner? We've christened every inch of the seven-hundred square feet in this place in the past few days, but we haven't christened this door. I think this as Derek reaches his hands under my upper thighs and lifts me. _Oh,_ I think. _We're not going anywhere at all._

And we don't. I wrap my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck and smile at him as he awkwardly removes his swim trunks while we're in this position. He doesn't bother with my bikini at all, merely peeling it to the side. I feel his gentle fingers on me, making sure I'm ready and then he's inside me with a shared grunt and moan.

The curtains on the windows blow and billow from the sea breeze and Derek's arms are around me, and we are the most beautiful things in the the Bahamas at the moment, maybe the world. I think this and then I have to close my eyes to the sights around me, because it's all too much. His soft hands are on my hips and he's pushing me back against the door, his muscles rippling as he moves inside me.

We are perfection at this, living this loud and loving this much. We are a chorus when Derek's moans increase in tempo and my whimpers and sighs and crying out in alto to temper his baritone. We are quiet puffs of air when it's all over, deep breathing between deep kisses.

We're pretty damn awesome for two people who have tipped the scales into their mid-forties.

When Derek pulls out of me and adjusts the bottom of my swimsuit, my legs are like rubber. I sink to the floor and he smiles at me. He fetches the plate of sandwiches and two bottles of water. He tosses a towel on the floor and sits down, completely relaxed in his nakedness.

"Sorry," he says as he bites into his sandwich. "I couldn't help myself."

I huff out a laugh. "Don't ever apologize for something like that."

He grins and I pick up a sandwich, taking a bite, marveling, not for the first time, at how the two of us and our pasts collided together to make something so magnificent with each other.

The rest of the day is a haze of memories. We leave the cottage long enough to jump into the ocean together one last time, and then we're back inside again, this time on the bed. We have dinner reservations that we blow off. Instead, Derek heads out to pick up food for us, which we eat in the bathtub. We both concede to the notion that we can sleep on the plane home the next day and we're up much of the night. I acknowledge that sleep will be possible on the plane, but sometimes around four o'clock in the morning - when I'm on my knees and Derek is behind me, his chest draped over my back - I begin to wonder if I'm even going to be able to walk through the airport.

We leave the cottage at eight o'clock in the morning. We cross the threshold with our suitcases and smiles on our faces, and we're both managing to walk. Sometime in the cab ride to the airport, our focus shifts, nearly simultaneously. The past five days have been indescribable, but going home is going to be amazing, too.

We do sleep on the flight, our fingers entwined.

We arrive home to Leon, who runs down the front steps and jumps into Derek's arms and reaches a hand towards me, so we can wrap ourselves around each other.

We arrive home to Fran and my father, who is holding Rory. And my sweet baby girl looks at me curiously for a second, like she might have forgotten who I was. But then she smiles. "Mama!" she exclaims in delight and then reaches for me.

It's later that night, when Rory latches right on to breastfeed before going to sleep, that the tears come. Derek is tucking Leon in and my beautiful girl with her eyes just like mine and her rich, mocha skin is gazing at my face as she drinks.

Her hands are grasping at my skin and her eyes are getting heavy and my tears drip down my face. It's not about missing my time with Derek, or missing the kids while we were gone. It's about everything - that Derek and I get this. We get this home and our family and friends and our children, but we get things like the Bahamas, too.

We get it all, and it's so good it's overwhelming.


	2. Chapter 2

The desk in his bedroom sits beneath a little window. It used to be under the much larger window that looks out over our front yard, but he moved it. From the little window, he can look right into the door of my mother's apartment that sits above our garage. The garage sits at an angle to our house and my mother's door really isn't that far away from Leon's window, perhaps twenty feet – ten feet of roof on our side, a gap of about two feet and then another eight feet or so of garage roof before it slopes into the landing by my mother's front door.

Today, my mother's door is open, even though it's October and the air has cooled considerably. Leon is sitting at his desk, some colored pencils spread around and paper in front of him. His window is open and the wind kicks up and his drawn blinds make a clicking noise against the window frame. Leon isn't looking at the drawing paper on his desk; he's gazing through his window and into my mother's screen door.

"What are you doing, Buddy?" I ask my son.

He startles slightly at my voice coming from his doorway, then turns his head with a wistful grin playing on his lips. "It smells like she's making a chocolate cake. Do you think it's chocolate frosting, too?"

Leon has quite a few weaknesses of basic pleasure.

He's a sucker for his grandfather and will drop whatever he's doing to talk with him. They sit on Chris's front porch, the two of them out there like Leon's a old man, too, his feet up on the porch railing and laughing and jabbering away with Chris.

His baby sister is wrapped around his little finger. _Lahnon_ , she calls him in her sweet one-year-old voice. And any time she utters the word, Leon smiles.

He's got my mother, who is more often than not at our house during the weekdays. But on weekends, she's in her own space much of the time. She and Leon talk through his window, and Emily and I always know when she's baking and has offered up something good, because Leon will come barreling down the stairs and out the front door. "I'm going to Nana's," he'll call on his way through the house. On the days the windows are open, we can hear him running across the driveway and then his feet pounding up the stairs to her apartment.

And he's got chocolate, specifically anything chocolate that my mom bakes.

I laugh at the look of hopefulness on his face and catch the scent of chocolate in the air. "I'm sure it will be chocolate frosting."

He wrinkles his nose. "She made vanilla frosting for Rory's birthday cake."

I step forward and tousle his hair, suppressing another laugh. "Yes, but this is for your mama's birthday, and she likes chocolate almost as much as you do."

Leon looks back out the window and contemplates that. "I think it will be chocolate," he says sincerely.

I look over his shoulder at the paper on his desk. "What are you working on?"

"A poem for Mama, but I'm done."

The sound of the front door opening filters up the stairs and Henry's voice rings through the house. "Leon! I'm here."

Leon stands and smiles excitedly, grabbing a backpack from the floor of his room. The bag is stuffed with everything good about being nine years old and happy – action figures, treasure maps he and Henry have made over, sticks and rocks and binoculars and snacks. It's his tree house bag, and he and Henry and Jack will likely spend hours up in that little sanctuary I built him until we call them down for dinner.

He takes off out of his bedroom and I hear his feet on the stairs. I turn and glance through his window and see my mom moving around her kitchen. "You better hope you're making chocolate frosting, or Leon might never recover," I call out.

I see her figure moving towards the door and she opens her screen with a smile on her face. "I'm more frightened of what Emily might do to me if I presented her with anything but chocolate frosting at her birthday party."

I laugh. "JJ and Will just got here. You about ready to head over?"

"Twenty minutes," she calls out as she goes back into her space to finish up the cake.

My mother is a pretty big weakness for me, too. She's the woman I remember from before my father died, even though she's decades older now. She is relaxation and joy and love and I relish every moment I get to spend with her. I miss our hours in the afternoon together now that I'm working full-time again, but the job's good for me, too. And I still spend more hours with her in a week now than I ever did in a year when she lived in Chicago.

I slide the paper on Leon's desk towards me and lift the fold, looking at his neat script and the images he's drawn around the edge of the page.

 _Mama is…_ The title reads.

 _Mama is the first twinkling stars in the sky  
When you're sad the day is over, but then you see them  
And you know night can be good, too._

 _Mama is the flowers in our garden in the summer  
Each day better and brighter and prettier._

 _Mama is warm like a fireplace  
When I'm cold, I just want to sit closer to her  
She warms me inside and out_

 _Mama is laughter and smiles and kisses on my cheek  
She makes every day good, as soon as I see her face in the morning._

 _Happy Birthday, Mama._

 _Love,  
Leon_

I smile and swallow past a lump in my throat. That pretty much sums it up, and it's also going to be the gift that makes the necklace I bought Emily pale in comparison. I think I'll wait to give her her gift from me when I take her out to dinner in a few nights on her actual birthday.

I run my fingers over Leon's writing and hear Rory babbling in her room, waking up from her nap. "Mamamamama," she calls out.

I leave Leon's room and walk down the hall to her bedroom door. When I open it, she's standing in her crib. She grins when she sees me, her curly hair wild and beautiful on her head, and her eight pearly white teeth practically glowing in her mouth. "Dada," she exclaims, raising her arms.

I lift her and she immediately rests her head on my shoulder, still slightly sleepy. I love the weight of her little body against my chest. "It's time for Mama's birthday party," I whisper in her ear, inhaling the honey smell of the shampoo we use on her hair.

She lifts her head and looks at me. "Mama?"

"Yep. Your Mama. The most beautiful woman in the world. Let's get you changed and then we'll head downstairs."

I lay her on her changing table and unsnap the legs of her pants. "Zachary's here," I tell her as her eyes that you could get lost in stare at my face. "And JJ and Will and Henry."

Soon, Hotch and Jack and Rossi and Spencer and Penelope will be here, too. I've lost count of the number of times we've all been together in this house for celebrations large and small, and often just because, in the past year. There've been some changes, with JJ now working as a Guardian Ad Litem for the DC court system. Penelope's had a few interviews, but ultimately hasn't taken any job she's been offered, like she's not quite ready to give up the BAU. Spencer was gone for about six months, taking an offer to work at a government think tank, but then he went back to the BAU. I think that one surprised us all.

But as a whole we're still the same strong unit we were before, just slightly altered and a little softer around the edges now, spending a lot of our collective free time together with so many kids running around.

I get Rory's new diaper on and snap up her pants, tossing the old diaper in the pail.

"Ready, Princess?"

She smiles at me and gives me an answer of babbled vowels and consonants and reaches her arms up. I lift her again and we head downstairs. Emily's at the bottom of the stairs waiting for me, a small smile playing on her lips and a baby monitor in her hand. She seems to be in some sort of age-regression continuum; a few days away from forty-seven years old and she looks just as young as the first time I met her in the briefing room.

"Most beautiful woman in the world, huh?" she whispers to me.

I wrap my free arm around her shoulders and kiss her briefly. "Definitely."

* * *

 _I first met Marietta in the summer of 1999. My family was in full swing by then, with buyers and plans and we were all to deliver a child to our Master. It wasn't a plan I relished, but it was a plan I was trapped in, and I felt compelled to please my family, even if I didn't like the ultimate end. I had no particular interest in children, and, truth be told, if it wasn't for the cocaine I ingested on certain occasions, I could have never stomached it._

 _Marietta, at the age of ten, was a spirited little thing, with fiery red, curly hair and green eyes. She had grimy hands and dirty fingernails and wore ratty clothing that was about a size too small. I'd watched her in the park for weeks as she stole from the purses and diaper bags of unsuspecting people at the park. I sat and watched with my hands shoved in my pockets, sitting on park benches and selling the meth I'd cooked to poor schleps who would do anything for a fix. It was my side business. I was a chemist by degree and nature, cooking meth was a hobby, and my lab was impeccable. But it was just a side business that added to my personal bank account, rather than the family's._

 _My real job was finding little boys and girls like Marietta; my second was to sell and distribute the cocaine to the family and our clients. I was the padder of the bank accounts when we were first starting out and we didn't have that many buyers._

 _I took Marietta on a Tuesday afternoon. When I had her in my car, she didn't struggle. I pulled out the syringe to plunge it in her leg, and her green eyes pierced mine. Her voice was a whisper, "Go ahead. Won't be no worse than what my daddy do to me every night."_

 _My hand with the syringe paused and guilt washed through me, but just for a second. I had a job to do, and I was trained to do it. I plunged the needle into her leg and held her body while she went limp. I delivered as I said I would, at the precise time and location I was told. I delivered her to Adrian, who months ago had said quietly to me while swirling scotch in a glass, "It's your year for a girl. Find me a redhead with curly hair if you can."_

 _I saw Marietta briefly at the auction that year, and then again at every auction for the next four years. A few months before what would have been her sixth auction, when she was fifteen years old, I got the call from the people who purchased her that they were done with her._

 _It was my least favorite job, disposing of the street kids we kidnapped when people were done with them, and I'd only had to do it once before. Perhaps Adrian would spare her and re-sell her, but at the age of fifteen, I doubted it._

 _He surprised me. I'd ingested enough cocaine to be amped up for the task at hand, but he yelled at me to stop right before I brought the knife to Marietta's neck. Adrian stepped forward and pulled the cover off her face. He patted her cheek gently, and I sighed in relief, thinking we might both be given a reprieve that day._

 _Then Adrian said something I wasn't expecting; something entirely out of character. He seemed to be in a trance as he stared at Marietta's face, her green eyes glaring at him defiantly. "I'll take her. She can be mine."_

 _I blinked and covered my shock. "Yes, Master," I said._

 _That snapped him out of his trance. He glared at me and then ordered me from the house._

 _Three months later, Marietta wasn't at the auction. Peter Daniels was there with his brother Robert, and their boy. Embry. Robert was walking around like he was part of the family already, and I knew. I just knew._

 _I thought they were planning to kill me, but they didn't. Two days after the auction, I was scared out of my mind and trying to figure out a way to disappear when the police came and arrested me. The charges were air tight. My secondary home under an assumed name, a home only Adrian supposedly knew about, was raided. So much cocaine. My meth lab._

 _I went down hard._

 _I never sold the family out, even after I was sentenced. My loyalties ran deep and I knew who had screwed me over, and there was no way to take Adrian and Peter down without taking them all down, and in my own perverse way, I loved the rest of them, and I was still beholden to my Master. So I sucked it up. I rose again in prison, making the best of it, and feeling almost free. Free from Adrian, and free from having to deal with children and murder._

 _Then, two years ago, I fell again. I fell harder than before, but thankfully prison officials intervened before my cellmates found out. Two guards whisked me out of my cell one day, not giving me a chance to grab a thing, and carted me off to a locked down area of the prison. A cell with cameras. I was officially on suicide watch._

 _Perplexed, I turned to the guard. He shoved a paper through the bars and spit on my face._

 _There on the front page was pictures of everyone in the family. "SEX-TRAFFICKING RING BROUGHT DOWN."_

 _The whole sordid story was there, and my name was mentioned. Several times. There was also a picture of the head of London Interpol at a press conference. Emily Prentiss. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place her in my memory._

 _I'm not sure I was scared when I read the article, just numb and shocked. The court system dragged its sweet feet getting to me. The first time I went to face my new charges of rape and sex trafficking and murder, nearly a year after the family was brought down, my court-appointed barrister fell asleep, right there next to me, and I was sent back to prison without any trial at all, even though anything less that pleading guilty would have gotten me nowhere._

 _I went back to lock down, and was starting to wonder if they'd ever get to me again. Then I got my court date and a new court-appointed barrister. October 10._

 _I'd been in lock down for over two years at that point, only getting out in the yard with the other rapists and pedophiles for an hour a day. Court or no court, my situation wasn't going to improve for the rest of my life. This was it for me and if I could have killed myself, I would have._

 _I arrived at court on October tenth in shackles and was lead through the back door. I caught a glimpse of her almost right away. She looked older, but I'd know that red, curly hair and those green eyes anywhere. She glanced beyond me, like she didn't know me at all, but she bent over and clutched her stomach, slightly grimacing, then gave a barely perceptible nod towards the bathroom._

 _I've never been a stupid man. I'm quick witted and sharp, and even two years with hardly a soul to talk to hadn't turned my brain to mush._

 _I groaned. I clutched my stomach. "Bathroom," I moaned._

 _I had a guard and my court appointed barrister, who was about as dumb as the first one I had. The guard grunted, but my lawyer turned towards the bathroom._

 _I groaned again. "I'm seriously going to be sick."_

" _Nervous?" the guard grinned._

" _Let him in," my lawyer said._

 _It was the bathroom appointed for prisoners who were in court. I'd been in it before. A utilitarian toilet, a small sink, no windows, no locking door._

 _The guard pushed opened the door and looked around at the small, empty space. He undid my handcuffs, but left my ankles shackled. He pushed me through the door and I nearly tripped before righting myself. The door swung shut and I glanced around quickly. What did Marietta want me to find?_

 _I glanced in the toilet and there it was, a glimpse of metal in the bottom of the bowl. I reached my hands in and pulled out a key, with a small laminated paper attached. "Look up."_

 _I made gagging noises in the toilet, doing a convincing acting job, as I unlocked my shackles. Limbs free, I climbed up on the sink, making more retching noises. "Just a moment," I called out through the door._

 _The ceiling panels were screwed in, but the one above the sink had the screws removed, and it lifted easily. I was able to hoist myself quickly._

 _I lifted myself up into the ventilation system and right into a dead body. Shocked, I looked at his blond and gray hair that was so much like mine. Then I looked at the bomb attached to him. I leaned my head out of opening in the ceiling and made retching noises again, but they weren't so fake that time._

 _I flipped the bomb on and nearly fainted when ten seconds started ticking away. I pushed my feet against the body until it dropped through the opening of the ceiling and to the floor, knowing the noise would cause the guard to open the bathroom door, but there wouldn't be time to do much else._

 _I crawled for my life down the vent in the only direction to go, counting down in my head and then turned a corner where there was a pile of clothing. The bomb went off, rattling my bones, but not harming my body._

 _I pulled the clothes on over my prison garb and looked around frantically. There was a single light coming from down the shaft and I crawled towards it. It was a flashlight. I slid the ceiling panel slightly and saw pandemonium below. Pandemonium that I dropped into casually. I took the first exit door I saw and there beyond the sidewalk and screaming people was Marietta, standing by a car on the curb. I made my way towards her and got in the front seat._

" _Holy shit! It worked." a male voice exclaimed incredulously from behind me, making me jump._

 _I turned and there was Embry. I was shocked. I was confused. I was scared. I was free, and that body blown to bits would buy me some time to disappear, but I didn't understand how Marietta was here or why she helped me._

 _She got into the driver's seat and looked at me, smiling slightly. She started the car and we drove away from the chaos, passing police cars and ambulances coming from the other direction._

 _When we were a few miles away from the courthouse, I managed one word. "Why?"_

" _Adrian," she said wistfully. "I told him I needed more help than Embry, and he suggested you."_

" _Help for what?" I asked, trying to absorb it all._

" _Revenge," she said simply._

 _I shivered involuntarily. Her voice sounded just like Adrian's. Cold and demanding and sure with few words at all._

 _I licked my lips that felt very dry and cleared my throat._

" _Where are we going?"_

" _Back to the United States," Embry said excitedly. "To get what we need to start over."_

 _I glanced at Embry and then at Marietta and very much just wanted out of that car. Marietta snarled at Embry, "Calm yourself!"_

 _Then she glanced at me and patted my knee. She slid her hands up higher on my thigh and grinned appreciatively. "Revenge and the money to start over," she said softly._

 _I didn't buy her softness, not in the slightest. And I knew I wasn't busted out of prison to be the one in charge in this little starting-over plan. That honor rested on the shoulders of Marietta, who was every bit as frightening as the man who had kept her since she was fifteen years old._

* * *

His gentle fingers on the back of my neck cause me to shiver, and I smile as I feel the chain clasp around me and the subtle weight of the pendant rest against my chest. It's an orange diamond that matches my engagement ring. Derek shouldn't have, but he did, and I love it.

I feel his lips brush across my cheek before he stands and takes his seat opposite me at our little corner table in the restaurant. This seafood bar in Old Town Alexandria is our favorite, but we try to reserve our visits to special occasions, like my birthday.

I've been in a slight funk for the past couple of days, ever since Marcus Klaus called me on Monday and told me Patrick Joyce had been blown up in the bathroom at a courthouse. Patrick Joyce, the man who I'd met a sex club back in 2004, the first time I tried to go in and figure out the inner workings of Adrian Stancu's "family."

I was pulled off the case and sent in after Doyle instead, and a few months after that Patrick had been arrested on drug-trafficking charges. He never faced trial for the more heinous crimes he committed; someone had blown him to bits right before he could. They don't have any clues as to who could have done it, but an angry family member of one of the victims or one of the victims himself is what's swirling around the rumor mill according to Marcus. I can't say I'd blame any family member or victim if that's the case. And I'm not sorry Patrick's dead, not in the slightest. May he burn in hell.

But my past, which is only a little over two years old, seems so far away, like another lifetime. And I don't like being reminded of it at all.

I got myself together this morning, on my birthday, when Derek arrived in the bedroom with Leon by his side holding Rory while Derek balanced a breakfast tray in his hands. I shook off the memories and my funk and vowed to have a good day and to stop thinking about it.

Between my birthday party at home with our friends and family this past Saturday, breakfast in bed this morning and dinner out tonight with Derek, along with the necklace, I'm feeling sufficiently spoiled and loved.

Derek and I have laughed a lot tonight as we ate our way through lobster and crab drenched decadently in butter and drank our way through an expensive glass of wine each. Our plates have been cleared now and we're waiting for coffee and a dessert to share. And Derek just gave me my necklace and placed it lovingly around my neck.

As he sits down in his chair he says, "I decided not to give that to you on Saturday. It couldn't compete with Leon's poem."

I smile softly and blink rapidly. How I love that little boy. How I love the man sitting in front of me and our life together. "It's pretty even," I whisper.

I reach for his hand over our cell phones that sit face down in the middle of the table. It's a habit we've gotten into, turning our phones on vibrate on the rare occasions we go out. We're no longer strapped down by our phones for our job, but we can't just tuck them away because we have children now.

"It'll be after nine by the time we're done with dessert and out of here," Derek says as he rubs his thumb on the back of my hand. "My mom will probably be passed out on the couch, and your dad will be asleep in his cabin. Think we can sneak onto the boat for a bit?"

I grin wider and nod. "Absolutely."

The waiter returns to our table with the coffee and chocolate cake we ordered. I haven't had quite enough chocolate yet on this birthday.

We share the cake silently, smiling slyly at each other, not wanting to rush things, but both of us with the boat on our minds, and the comfortable bed in there that's become our little, secret haven over the past year. Last spring we purchased better cushions for the bench seating that converts into the bed, and now, with nice sheets, it's almost as comfortable as our own bed. Just about three feet narrower, which isn't a problem for either of us.

Just as Derek grins and spears the last piece of cake on his fork, bringing it towards his mouth before changing directions and bringing his fork towards me, both of our cell phones vibrate at the exact same moment, making us both jump slightly.

I take the bite of cake in my mouth and blow a kiss in the air at Derek before I start to chew. We grab our phones casually, thinking it's just Fran letting us know that both kids are asleep, which she often does when she's watching them.

But what I see right there on my screen is not a text from Fran, and I know Derek sees it at the same moment I do. He stands instantly and forcefully, his chair falling backwards onto the ground. I don't think I'm breathing as I stare at the message. My heart is beating frantically and I can't make sense of it. This isn't our life anymore, this fear and dread. We don't live this.

I feel Derek's hand in mine a second later and he's pulling me to standing. Then we are both jogging for the door, forgetting about the bill, my phone still in front of my face like the letters on the screen are going to magically transform into a different message than what's there. Because what I'm seeing doesn't make sense.

Leon, Fran and my father all know the code, the code that's reserved for severe emergencies. If Fran or my father was hurt or sick, whomever wasn't hurt would call us. And if both of them somehow were hurt, Leon would call us or a neighbor.

I'm still staring at the message as we get in the car and Derek pulls harshly away from the curb, tires squealing.

 _Central Security Group reported a distress alarm at Morgan Home at 8:55pm. Police have been dispatched._


	3. Chapter 3

_Leon sat on the tenth step down from the top of the stairs. With his feet tucked up and a book in his lap, he was protected from the view of the kitchen by a wall. Just one step down and they would be able to see his feet through the banisters._

 _He was supposed to be in bed. He'd read two chapters of "Bud, Not Buddy," to Grandpa on the couch, and then he'd brushed his teeth and washed his face and Nana had tucked him into bed. It was 8:45 and lights out for him was 8:30, and he never broke the rules, but he was curious tonight._

 _Usually when Nana and Grandpa watched him, Grandpa would go back to his cabin right after reading with him, but he didn't go tonight. And just last night, while he was in bed and waiting for sleep to come, he heard muffled noises through his bedroom window. Rolling out of his bed and crawling to his desk, he saw them there. Nana's porch light was on, and Grandpa kissed her cheek. She smiled at him._

 _He hadn't told anyone. It felt like a secret and there were so very few of those in his world that he held onto it. But tonight, when Nana was bringing him upstairs to tuck him in, Grandpa said, "I'll start some water for tea." Nana nodded and smiled softly. And Leon just couldn't go to sleep after that._

 _He glanced at his book. It was really a very interesting story, but he was mostly sitting there listening to Nana and Grandpa. Nana laughed when Grandpa said, "We could start a game of Scrabble. The boat will see the two of them before we do."_

 _Leon didn't quite understand and he didn't know why Nana laughed like that, but he liked the sound of it._

 _He glanced at the page in his book, wondering why it had gotten so silent in the kitchen and wanting to go down a step and peek through the banister, but knew he could get caught if he did that. He held still, biting his lower lip and then slowly stood. He was about to take a step down to look into the kitchen when he heard Nana gasp. "Who are you?" she yelled. "Get out of here!"_

 _Leon stood automatically, his book sliding off his lap. He'd never heard his Nana with that voice and it scared him._

 _A different voice whispered, "Don't make me shoot you."_

 _Leon wasn't sure what happened. He felt goosebumps on his skin and the hair on the back of his neck tickled. He recognized that voice, even though he'd tried to block it all out. It was a voice he'd heard only once before, when he'd been with Adrian for what seemed like forever. Leon was sitting, naked and huddled against the wall of something that looked a lot like a cave. Two men came in to look at Leon and the other children there._

 _Leon barely looked up, but he glanced and saw them. The one man, the one who looked younger, stepped in front of him and squatted down. He touched Leon's knee. He whispered in the same voice Leon just heard in his kitchen, "If you don't believe it's bad, it won't be."_

 _In the cave, Leon had ventured a glance up at the man. A glance of hope._

 _In the cave, the man slapped him hard across the cheek, and then both men started laughing as they walked away, down one of the tunnels._

 _In his home, hearing that voice again, Leon stood frozen on the stairs and didn't understand why his pants felt so wet at first. Then he realized he'd just peed, the lighter blue of his flannel pajamas turning dark in his lap. He felt it dripping down his legs, over his ankles and onto the wooden step._

" _Don't even look at the alarm, Old Man," the same voice whispered. "This is going one of two ways. You're going to tie her up, and then I'm going to tie you up, and I'm going to get the kids. Or I'm going to shoot you both, and then I'm going to get the kids."_

 _Leon startled at the word alarm. There was a panel there in the kitchen, but there was another one just ten steps above him, in the hallway outside of his parent's bedroom, but he couldn't make his legs move. All he was thinking about was Rory. There was no way that man was taking Rory. Rory was just a little a baby, his sister. And he wouldn't let anyone touch her, no matter how scared he was._

 _He heard a grunt. The man yelled out a swear word. Nana screamed. Grandpa yelled, "You aren't touching those babies!"_

 _Those sounds and voices got his legs moving again. He stepped back, skipping the ninth step, which squeaked, his left foot landing on the eight step. He pulled himself up the stairs quickly, but quietly, and looked at the alarm panel. He and Mama and Papa had talked a lot about what to do if he ever felt unsafe, but most of that involved screaming and fighting. They never talked much about what to do when screaming and fighting wouldn't work, but he knew it wouldn't, not like this, with Rory asleep in her crib and a bad man in their house._

 _He was there and had listened intently the day the alarmed was installed. If he hit the 9-1-1 button, a voice would come over the speaker. But there was a distress code. He knew the word, "distress." He pretending he'd never lived with distress, but he had. And he knew he was back there, being distressed again. His fingers reached out quickly and punched in the buttons. Silent Arm, then 0-9-2-8, then pound. He got no answers from the panel. He wasn't supposed to, but he hoped it had worked._

 _Then he was moving quickly to Rory's room without making his feet pound on the floor. He couldn't reach her while she was sleeping in her crib, not the way he usually could hold her. The sides of the crib were too high for him. So he reached over and grabbed onto the back of her pajamas, holding tight and pulling her sleeping body up and over the side of the crib._

 _She fussed quietly and moved her body, and Leon righted her, holding her against him like he did sometimes before her nap, when she fell asleep against him. Her thumb went in her mouth and she rested her head on Leon's shoulder. She was just a baby. She didn't know she should be scared, but Leon felt like his heart was going to beat right out of his chest._

 _Where to hide? Mama and Papa's closet? He made that decision, but then he heard Nana scream and cry out again from downstairs, and all he could think about was getting out of the house with Rory. He wanted to help his Nana and Grandpa, but he was too little and he couldn't. But he could help Rory.  
_

 _Nana._

 _He'd thought about it before, surprising her by climbing through his window, jumping between his roof and the roof of the garage, and ending up at her front door. But he hadn't done it yet, too scared it would upset Nana and his parents. He could make the jump on his own, he knew. But he didn't know if he could do it with Rory in his arms. She felt so heavy._

 _There were noises from downstairs. Grunts and slapping noises and he stopped thinking. He ran to his room with Rory and used one hand to open his window above his desk, almost dropping her while holding her in just one arm._

 _Both arms around her again, he climbed on his desk chair and then onto his desk. He kicked out his screen. He slid through the small window, nervous now about making the jump, but knowing there was no other way down onto the ground._

 _Rory raised her head slightly from his shoulder, seeming confused about being outside. "I won't let them hurt you," he whispered to her._

 _It was cool outside. There was a breeze and his wet pajamas felt cold against his skin. He stood there by his window for a few seconds and then he heard feet pounding up the stairs. He ran. He ran down the slight slope of the roof without thinking about it. He jumped. He landed on the garage roof and almost dropped Rory before righting himself by falling to his knees and then standing up again. She started fussing in his arms and he whispered, "Shhh."_

 _She was so heavy._

 _He'd never carried her like this for this long, when she was mostly asleep and her full body weight rested on him._

 _He took the slightly inclined steps up the garage roof carefully, but quickly. Nana's door was right there and he made it, sagging in relief, reaching for the handle. But the door was locked. Desperate, he looked back towards his window. The man was there. He had a mask on, and his gun was held outside the window, pointing at Leon._

 _Leon forgot how heavy Rory felt. He ran down the steps and the man swore again._

 _Leon knew if he could just make it to the driveway, he could cut through the trees on the other side of the garage and run to his friend Ainsley's house. But when his foot landed at the bottom of the stairs, the motion sensor light kicked on. There was a van in his driveway. Blue. A dark blue van. And a different man in the driver's seat._

 _He couldn't make it to Ainsley's house. He heard the faint sounds of sirens that seemed like a very long way away. Rory fussed in his arms.  
_

 _The man got out of the van, moving towards Leon, and Leon turned towards the backyard. He started running as fast as he could while holding Rory. He heard the man shout, "What the fuck are you doing?"_

 _But he didn't stop running. "Get away. Go fast now. Don't let them hurt us," his mind kept saying. He could hardly feel how heavy Rory was anymore. His running felt strange. He'd never run before when his whole body was trembling._

* * *

My heart is thudding so hard, I can feel the pulse in my ears. Emily's chanting something, but I can't make out the words. Her teeth are chattering around her mumbled phrase, a static-filled soundbite on repeat. I've never seen fear grip her so completely, but I can't focus on her face right now. I can only focus on the road in front of me, the few miles from Old Town Alexandria to our house. There were red lights and traffic that held us up at first, but now it's a straight-away. I'm doing eighty in a thirty miles per hour zone, and it's not fast enough.

I bank the car sharply to the left and make the turn onto the road that will lead us straight home, tires screeching on the pavement as I pull in front of two police cars going just as fast as I am, their lights flashing and sirens blaring.

Emily's voice raises slightly when she spots the flashing lights. _Too complacent._ That's what she's muttering.

I'm living in a dream - a nightmare - as I pull the car in the driveway and miss the mark, driving up partially over our front lawn. _This can't be happening to us._ That sentence is playing on repeat in my mind.

Emily's out of the car door before I've completely stopped and we see it at the same time, our front door standing wide open.

I'm by her side in an instant in this surreal experience where we're walking into a crime scene in our own home. _It's not possible_ , I think. Just this evening before we left for dinner, I was tossing Rory up in the air and catching her while she laughed. When she tired of the game, I wrestled on the ground with Leon for a few minutes while I waited for Emily to finish dressing for dinner.

Just a little over two hours ago.

And now our house is this. There are drops of blood in the entry way. There's a note on the ground. _Time to pay the piper._ There's Chris, crumpled and unconscious on the floor near the stairs, the cane he sometimes uses resting right beside him.

And there's silence.

I sense the police officers enter the house as I watch Emily crouch down before her father and feel for a pulse. She nods quickly at me as I race up the stairs. I pass a puddle of wetness on the stairs and Leon's book from school, wondering how both ended up there. I fling open doors and closets and look into bathrooms.

 _Is this my home? Am I living this?_ I ask myself as I find nothing but emptiness. _This can't be real._

I feel a breeze and run back towards Leon's room. His window is open, the blinds rattling against the window pane again with the wind. There's no screen.

 _There's no screen._

I'm tempted to go right through the window, but I think of Emily in her desperation in the kitchen and run back down the stairs again.

"I think Leon went out his window," I gasp.

There are police officers and they are talking. One is on the floor next to Chris. We're disrupting a crime scene and they can all go straight to hell if they try to stop us now as we take off again out the front door, turn left, and head towards the stairs that lead to my mother's apartment.

We bound the stairs, and I notice the motion sensor lights by the garage flicking on. The door is locked, and Emily is crying out, "Leon! Fran!" as I fumble for my keys.

I'm out of my mind. I'm Derek Morgan. I'm searching for my kids and my mother, and I'm fumbling for keys.

Emily takes the matter out of my hands as she rears back and then barrels her shoulder against the door. It barely gives, but the next time, I participate and the door bursts inward with our impact. We search, quickly and efficiently, but the small space is entirely void of any occupants.

My wife stoops slightly, overwhelmed by grief, but she quickly rights herself and she's out the door and running down the stairs.

Lights flash on as we move, the flood lights on the back of our house flickering on and shining brightly, and then the motion sensor light on Chris's cabin as we approach the porch. I'm vaguely aware of a police officer following us on our jog. He's trying to ask us questions.

"Who are we looking for?"

And the only word I can think in my head as I run beside Emily is, "Everything."

Emily, for all her frantic movement, is the one who's able to speak logically. "One-year-old girl, nine-year-old boy, and a seventy-two year old woman."

Her voice sounds like it's coming through a dispatch speaker. It's heavy and muffled and it doesn't sound like Emily at all.

Chris's door opens up. He rarely locks it. We spread out and search, Emily first running towards the ladder to the loft, where Leon sleeps when he spends the night with Chris.

When she climbs back down and looks in my face, I lose her. She runs outside of the cabin and, illuminated by faint light, she collapses against the back lawn, sinking to her knees. Wailing almost silently. Digging her fingers in the grass and damp earth, digging it up, like she's going to find our lives under there when they seem so lost.

I look at her and find the moment, find the woman I want to protect and love more than anything in the world, and I sink to my knees before her. I wrap her in my arms and we sob for a minute. There are flashlights in the yard. There's the sound of more sirens approaching, reinforcements and an ambulance for Chris. And there's Emily and me, her deep purple dress and her bare knees sinking into the lawn. Her arms are cold. We left her jacket in the restaurant. I can't believe I'm thinking about a a jacket.

 _We were just out to dinner for her birthday. How could this be?_

There's a hole in my chest and it's so deep that I don't know how I'm ever going to climb my way out. Emily's sobbing against me, her arms hanging loosely by her sides, like the effort to lift them is too much in the moment.

A cry wrenches through the wind, piercing us and causing us both to stiffen in disbelief. We wait, our chests leaning against each other for a few rapid heartbeats, and we hear it again. A cry. Rory's cry.

Emily is up, away from my body, and running faster than I've ever seen her run. She's a blur and I can barely keep up. Her heels hit the dock and I can hear them clap against the wood as she makes what should be twenty strides in just about ten.

She jumps onto the boat, and I'm right behind her. She opens the door to the cabin and takes in a shaky gasp. My face is wet with tears and the hole in my heart fills to nearly full, but not quite.

My son is there. I can see him in the faint light and his body faces away from us. He's on his knees on the bed, rocking, his entire body trembling, and he's not like any Leon I've ever seen before. His voice sounds like it's in a trance. He has one hand clutching a knife that came from the drawer in the boat, and the other hand is on Rory's chest. "Shh," he's whispering to her. "I won't let them hurt you, but you have to be quiet, Rory. I'm here. Shhh."

He's completely oblivious to our entrance, so lost in a haze of fear. He stays oblivious as Emily launches herself towards the bed, gathering Rory in her arms. He's oblivious when I step in right after her and join them on the bed. I reach my hand out and pull the knife from his hand. He let's go easily, but he's still not really seeing us. Emily has Rory against her chest and is sobbing. She reaches one hand out towards Leon and grabs his pajama shirt, pulling her towards him.

He snaps out of it then, as he falls against Emily and feels my arms come around his back, covering him and holding them all to me.

"Mama. Papa," he whimpers. "I wouldn't let them take her."

I sob then. It's my turn. My chest heaves and I'm making noises I've never heard before. My breath gasps and hitches and I could cry here on this boat with them in my arms forever from relief.

My children and Emily are here and they're safe.

But my mother is gone.


	4. Chapter 4

_Selling drugs is a craft. Kidnapping children is a fine art. Ransom is pure lunacy._

 _That's what I thought about when I was sitting in a van in the driveway of a beautiful home in Alexandria, Virginia. Lunacy. If it weren't for the locked ankle bracelet on my leg that recorded my movement, the fact that I was not allowed to hold onto my fake ID, and the fact that I had absolutely nothing and was in the US with no hope of a contact that could help me, I would have bailed on Embry. I would have taken off in that van._

 _There were rules my family had followed so we wouldn't get caught. The street kids were easy to lure, easy to take. They were bold in their unfortunate independence, walking confidently through alleys, hanging out in parts of towns where people tended to look the other way. The "chosen" children each year were a challenge, and we each had our own way of going about it. But there were rules we never broke. Rule number one: Look for children from middle class families, families without a lot of connections or resources. Rule number two: Never go into a home to take a child. You could get blindsided by someone in the home you didn't expect. People had cameras. People had alarms. You could leave an errant print or DNA behind even with the best preparation._

 _Embry broke all those rules last night._

 _He and Marietta are both loose cannons; Marietta compelled by revenge and the need for money, Embry compelled to follow anyone who gives him an order, and an underlying desire to avenge Robert - Bobby's - death. And I'm stuck here in the middle between their inexperience and insanity. I've only found one possible positive end in this for me, which is to get Marietta to trust me enough to remove the ankle bracelet and allow me to roam a little more freely. Then I'll run and never look back._

 _After Marietta and Embry helped me escape from the courthouse - which I considered lunacy as well and we all just got lucky it worked - Marietta drove us to the very outskirts of the UK. She and Embry both had guns. We didn't stop to eat, I wasn't permitted to use the restroom. We were nearly in Scotland before she pulled the car off the freeway and winded her way through quiet country roads. It was dark when we arrived at the isolated home, and I no longer had my bearings. Perhaps we had crossed into Scotland by that point. There was the house that was a shadow against the sky, and nothing else for what seemed like miles._

 _"Where are we?" I asked._

 _"My home," she said simply._

 _She unlocked the door and I followed her into the house, Embry flanking my back. I tracked her as she turned on lights and walked to the kitchen. The home was lovely, well-decorated, and looked like something straight out of the English countryside. Marietta toed the lock on the wheel of a rolling shelving unit and pushed it aside. She took out her keys and began the task of unlocking two dead bolts on a thick wooden door behind the unit._

 _"Come," she ordered me as the door swung open._

 _I followed her down a flight of stairs and into a cellar. Though it was diminutive in size compared to the underground properties Adrian lived and used that I'd spent ample time in in the past, it reminded me enough of those years that my stomach fluttered nervously._

 _There was an open space and three doors in front of me. Marietta patted the first one, "My play room. I'll show it to you later," she said with a snake-like grin._

 _She skipped the second door, saying nothing._

 _She unlocked the third door and opened it slowly. I could see from where I stood the well-decorated, bright space. There was a young girl in there, blonde hair, pale face, maybe sixteen years old. She had a collar around her neck, but was dressed comfortably besides that._

 _She looked up at Marietta and then bowed her head._

 _"How did it go?" Marietta asked, almost kindly._

 _"Just fine ma'am, but it was hard for him to be down here for two days. He did okay though. We made up games."_

 _Marietta patted the blond hair gently. "You've done well, Holly."_

 _Holy smiled slightly and then bowed her head, clasping her hands together in her lap._

 _I watched Marietta's body shift and I stepped closer to the doorway. This room was nice, comfortable. I could see a bathroom and a small kitchen area, a couch and a nice bed, no windows. And a crib that Marietta was leaning over. She picked up a small body and turned to face me. He was maybe two years old, with red hair and green eyes like Marietta's, but everything else about his face was Adrian Stancu._

 _"Adrian Junior," Marietta said softly while kissing the boy's sleepy cheek. "I'll bring you up to your room, my beautiful boy," she said softly. If my assessment of his age was correct, she was either very pregnant or had just given birth to him when the family went down._

 _She didn't look back at Holly, and I followed her out of the room. She handed me the keys and nodded at the door. I locked it again. It was my first clue as to how completely removed she was from reality. She obviously loved her little boy, as much as a woman like her could love another, but she'd left him here in a locked cellar for two days. If something had gone wrong at that courthouse in London, little Adrian and Holly could have both eventually died down there._

 _Once Adrian was settled in his crib upstairs, I watched Marietta close his door._

 _"Hungry?" she asked me._

 _I nodded. I was both starving and nauseous, but I needed to eat and keep my head clear._

 _"We just need to take care of one thing," she said as she led me back down the stairs._

 _Embry was there waiting in the kitchen, and he raised his gun on me. I put my hands up passively. They didn't break me out of prison to kill me. They wanted me for a very specific purpose I hadn't figured out at the time. So I raised my hands and stared at Embry as Marietta grabbed a device from the kitchen table and bent to put my ankle brace on. She locked it and pocketed the key._

" _Just until we get to know each other again," she whispered as she patted my back. She kissed my cheek and then continued in a soothing voice, letting me know that if I strayed too far away from where I should be, the ankle bracelet could be remote detonated. "You won't get far on one leg, bleeding out, Patrick," she said as she licked my ear._

 _Fantastic. I think I'd prefer prison._

 _It was later that night that I found out the plan - a plan they wanted to execute immediately, before concrete DNA evidence came back on the body in that courthouse bathroom and my face was plastered all over the news._

 _Marietta took me to her playroom and strapped me on a table. I'd experienced both the giving and receiving end of this particular type of play before, and I'd enjoyed both. But it had been over a decade. I hadn't so much as caught the scent of a woman in all of that time, and I let the sensations of a naked Marietta take over. She was marking me, trying to make me hers, lashing me and then trying to sooth me. I wouldn't let it work, but I faked it well and did enjoy her while it lasted._

 _And then she took me into the second locked room in the basement. Her naked, flushed body stood in front of a computer on a desk. There was a table on the opposite wall that had a small arsenal on it - a few guns, a couple of bombs that looked similar, but larger, than the one that we used in the courthouse, and a stack of cash - not much, but some._

 _There were also pictures on the wall. Pictures of an elderly man and a woman, a small sailboat, a large house, a small cabin. A little boy, and a biracial baby girl. And her parents, a black man and a caucasian woman - Emily Prentiss; Emily Morgan now, I learned. I recognized her from the newspaper I'd seen two years before. And there was still something about her face._

 _While Marietta told me about who Derek Morgan was and who the little boy was and then went on to detail her idiotic plan that was nothing more than a suicide mission in my mind, something clicked in my head. I looked away from Marietta's crazed eyes and looked back at Emily's face._

 _She had blond hair back then, and she wore far more makeup and far less clothing. But I was almost positive Emily was a woman I met in a club and invited to partake in a private club and room with me on a few occasions. Her name was Katarina and she had a Russian accent. She was also a lovely piece of ass, if my memory served me correctly. She must have been undercover back then. As Marietta talked about the details of exactly how the family went down, great fuck or not, Emily was likely lethal as hell._

 _This is all going to go to shit, I thought as I stared at her picture on the wall._

 _And go to shit it did._

 _Marietta wanted me because I was a pilot, and commercial aircraft would not do for her plan. She didn't have much money left; Adrian paid her a handsome allowance every month, but what she'd saved was running low after two years of nothing coming in. She had some artillery. She had a plane, a plane that Adrian had used when he visited her that none of the family knew about. Embry had spent several months surveilling the Morgan family, so she had the pictures. And she wanted those two children. She wanted to emotionally destroy Emily and Derek Morgan by making them suffer for some time while their children were gone. She wanted money from them, and when she had that, she'd return the two very broken children back to their parents, and we'd be long gone._

 _It was more likely we'd all be dead long before we got any money, but I said nothing. I nodded at her. "I can fly. It's been awhile, but you never forget." I said this optimistically and enthusiastically. I needed her to trust me._

 _Which was how I ended up with Embry in a van at the Morgan house less than forty-eight hours later. Marietta stayed in the UK. Embry had a gun. Embry had the detonation device on my ankle bracelet. Embry was dumb as fuck._

 _He was going around back and going into the home and he told me to wait in the car. "The old man will have gone back to his cabin. The old lady is probably asleep on the couch. I'll tie her up and get the kids. We can't risk you leaving anything of yourself behind."_

 _I clutched the steering wheel and nodded. I was transport only - the pilot who would get these two kids far away from the United States before anyone knew to look beyond the roads._

 _What the hell ever, I thought as I sat in that van. I figured I had a ten percent chance of getting out of this alive, possibly with some money and the means to start over with a new identity. I had a ninety percent chance of dying very soon._

 _And then it all happened very quickly. I heard the faint sound of sirens from the open van window. A flood light came on in the front yard, and about twenty yards from the van stood the little boy and the baby._

 _I got out of the van. My instinct was to tell the little boy to run like hell. Apparently prison_ can _change a man. Before I could utter a word, Leon was already running like hell. Before I could do anything, the front door of the house opened and Embry came barrelling out with the old lady - Fran - unconscious in his arms. The sirens were getting closer._

" _What the fuck are you doing?" I asked._

" _There was another alarm panel upstairs!" he said breathlessly._

 _Fucking idiot. Fucking amateurs._

 _He shoved the old lady in the back of the van and got in the passenger seat. "Drive," he said._

" _Marietta's going to kill us both," I said as I casually pulled the van out of the driveway and drove in the opposite direction of the sound of sirens._

" _They'll pay for the old lady, too," Embry said, but he looked frightened and his voice shook. I glanced over as he pulled over his ski mask and took note of the bright red, bleeding scratches on his neck._

 _I bumped my chance of living through all of this down to about one percent, and even that was optimistic._

* * *

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

" _Here," Clyde said to me before I could get on the jet._

 _I glanced up to the open doorway on the plane where Declan and Louise were waiting for me. "What's this?" I asked him, taking an envelope from his hands._

" _A couple of additional identities and some cash. With our jobs, it's best not to leave ourselves unprepared."_

 _I smirked at him and reached into my purse, pulling out my own brown envelope._

 _He grinned. "I've taught you well. Keep them all. You can never be too safe. Call me if you ever need anything else."_

I remember nodding at him, still reeling from my experience with Doyle. I didn't hug him, even though I wanted to in the moment. It seemed weak, and I had not time for weakness. I took the stairs up to the plane and didn't look back.

 _I wish I could call you right now, Clyde._

I'm an absolute mess. I'm sure my eyes are puffy and my makeup smeared. I'm sitting on the floor of our den, picking my nails for the first time in over two years. There's a faint scent of urine on me, because when I got Leon in my arms out on the boat, he latched his wet legs around my waist and his arms around my neck and wouldn't let me go.

I stare at the grass stains on my knees and the dirt caked on my fingers and the paper and brown envelope in my lap.

Hotch is here at the house, overseeing evidence collection. Reid is at the hospital with my father, in case he wakes up during the night. The rest of the team, JJ, Derek and our children are out Rossi's house.

When Leon first managed to speak on the boat, with his head on my shoulder and his lips near my neck, he said he recognized the voice of the man in our house from when he was with Adrian Stancu. Derek called Hotch immediately, and Hotch went toe to toe with the Alexandria Sheriff's Department, telling them the FBI would be taking this case. Hotch, who is usually so diplomatic with the local police was having no bullshit. He talked to the group of police officers at our house and stated very clearly that if any of this ended up in the paper, he'd personally have their badges.

We wouldn't be putting Fran's picture out there just yet until we knew what we were dealing with. That was our starting point, but over the course of the night, we had a pretty good idea of what we were dealing with, and none of it was good.

I received most of the news via phone calls and texts while I was waiting at the hospital for my father to have an MRI, wishing I could split myself in two, wanting to be there for him, and be with Derek, Leon and Rory at the same time.

I made some middle-of-the night calls to the Director of Interpol and to Marcus Klaus. Apparently the explosion at that courthouse in London two days prior had resulted in massive carnage of three people - A guard, an attorney and the man everyone presumed was Patrick. However, they'd not found any of Patrick's DNA.

I knew they weren't going to. That was confirmed a few minutes later when I sent Derek a picture of Patrick, and an exhausted Leon confirmed that he thought that was in the man in the driveway at our house.

I looked at Reid in that hospital waiting room, Reid who is a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge about past cases. I asked him how many children Adrian and his family auctioned off that were never recovered.

"Twelve," he said. "But only four would be in their twenties right now, possibly old enough to pull this off."

"We never found the other man who held Derek. There was Robert and Peter Daniels, and another younger man in his twenties."

Reid nodded.

"There can't be that many involved in this," I mumbled to myself, wishing I had Clyde right there in front of me to bounce this around with. "Three to five, at most. Amateurs. They didn't expect my father to be in the house still. They'd been watching us for quite awhile. Why would they want Patrick? It was a huge risk helping him escape. What did he have to offer to the group?"

I watched Reid close his eyes for a second, reaching into the recesses of his brilliant memory. He'd read every word of the case reports, every document recovered from Adrian's computers, every profile on every "family" member.

Reid opened his eyes and looked at me. "He had a pilot's license."

Anger and fear surged inside me. They churned and percolated immediately. Only once before had I ever felt like that, when Doyle was threatening the lives of the BAU.

I wanted to be an agent again, with a gun. No, that wasn't quite right. I wanted a gun and resources, but I didn't want to be an agent. I didn't want to have to follow any rules at all. In that moment, I wanted to find Fran and put an end to this once and for all, get our lives back to what they were. I was enraged that someone would do this to us. I was enraged that there was a crime scene unit going through our happy home with a fine-tooth comb.

I knew they wouldn't find a damn thing. Fran and my father did put up a fight, trying to prevent the man from getting up the stairs, a fight that bought Leon enough time to escape with Rory, for which there isn't enough gratitude in my heart or in the world. My father did have blood on his hands, and they were bagged and sampled. I think there will be a DNA match to other cases in the system, specifically two little boys who were raped and murdered in New York a little over two years ago, but it won't give us an identity. That's all they'll find.

And as I sat there in the hospital after it struck midnight and it was no longer my birthday, I knew without a doubt that Fran Morgan was no longer in the United States, and probably had been in the air not too long after the BAU showed up at our house.

When I got word that my father looked like he would be okay, that he had a concussion, but was in no serious danger, I left Reid at the hospital with him. I wanted to get to Derek and the kids, but I needed to make a pit stop first.

Hotch said nothing to me as I walked into my own home, avoiding the crime scene technicians. I felt his eyes on my back as I went into our den and closed the door. I first went to a box at the top of the closet. It was a box of random things I'd never found a place for in our home - my high school diploma, some commendations from the FBI and Interpol, and one small envelope.

I grabbed the envelope and then knelt on the floor and opened the safe. I sifted through our legal documentation that was in there until I found the single piece of paper with Clyde's handwriting; a list of names he'd left me concealed in the binding of a book. One man's name was starred, and the country code for his number told me he was in London.

I now contemplate both the list and the envelope.

 _Yes, Clyde, you taught me well._

Inside that envelope is not one of the ID's from my Interpol days; it's one of the ID's JJ gave me in France, along with about five thousand dollars. It was what was on me when I flew back to DC back in 2011, and I should have handed it over to Hotch, but I didn't. And he never asked about it. I tucked it away, because in my line of work, you should never leave yourself unprepared.

I glance around the den and my eyes land on drawings on the cork board hanging on the wall, pictures Leon's drawn. I take those in, and then my eyes shift to Rory's exersaucer, something she rarely wants to be in anymore since she can walk now. If I close my eyes, I can see her there, bouncing and giggling while I check my email. My computer is still on and the screen saver is scrolling through pictures. There's a few from the previous weekend at my birthday party with the team, and one floats by of the four of us, grinning around the birthday cake Fran made me, and then the image floats away on the screen.

I blink back the tears in my eyes. I can't do this. I can't be hard and soft at the same time. I don't know how - I never have. I couldn't be an agent, FBI or Interpol, and have a relationship. And I couldn't have a relationship and eventually a family and be an agent. My heart and mind don't work that way, and I can't focus on the softer parts of me that have been my existence for the past two years and do what I need to do now.

I want my children to grow up with their father, and hopefully me. I don't want us to have fake names in a different country away from our friends and family. And I know we will never be able to pull ourselves together and recreate anything normal or good again if Fran dies. I also know that the odds of us getting her back alive without intervention is slim to none. They wanted to emotionally wreck us. They wanted the kids, and I can see a scenario where they returned them in exchange for money, damaged but alive. But I can't wrap my mind around the idea that they'd return Fran.

I promised. I promised both Clyde, and later Derek, that I would never go undercover again. But none of us ever considered this contingency. Clyde only thought of me, and Derek thought of him and me when those promises were made. We didn't consider a family. We didn't consider a life like this that needed to be put back together once and for all. It's a promise that I can justify breaking in these circumstances.

A tap on the door startles me from my thoughts. Hotch opens the door and looks at me sympathetically as I sit on the floor of the den. "We're done here. Let's go Emily. You need to get to Rossi's and we can talk then."

I nod and stand. "Marcus and Interpol is sending Garcia all video footage available from the courthouse in London two days ago. I've also asked Marcus to get his hands on surveillance from the two times Adrian's been in the hospital since he was arrested. He never had any visitors in prison."

Hotch nods, his lips forming a thin line. He looks at the paper and envelope in my hand, and I take a deep breath. I turn away from him and grab one of Derek's small gym bags that we store in the closet. I snag Clyde's tactical jacket off a hanger and stuff it in the bag, followed by the paper and the envelope.

I sling the bag over my shoulder and turn back around. "You're going to have to do something for me. Not yet, but soon. I need some more information first, and I need to talk to Derek. But when the time comes, tomorrow or the next day, I'm going to need you to back me up. I'm going to need your promise that you'll let nothing happen to Derek and the kids. And I'm going to need you all to let me go."


	5. Chapter 5

Someone's been at our house to clean up, probably JJ at some point earlier this morning before she showed up again at Rossi's house. She and Will are the only ones with the keys and the alarm codes that could do this.

I expected to see the aftermath of the crime scene unit being in the house, but it's like they were never here. Where there should be fingerprint dust on the doors and door frames, they've been wiped clean. All signs of struggle have disappeared. The urine puddle and Leon's book are gone from the stairs, as is the throw rug that once sat in our entry-way - a rug that had my mother's blood on it. I walk upstairs and see that even Leon's screen is back in place on his window, slightly bent, but there. A quick glance out that window shows my mother's illuminated porch light, and a wooden board nailed between my mother's doorway and door, keeping the busted hinges in place.

In my mind, I can see JJ here before dawn broke, cleaning up our shattered home instead of taking a few hours for sleep. I can see her coming here before going to her own home. And I can see her leaving this house and going back to Will and Henry and Zachary, kissing them and hugging them, reveling in their intactness for a few minutes before saying she needed to leave again. No longer a member of the BAU, her bonds were held by love more than a badge. She was at Rossi's house this morning an hour before Hotch asked everyone to return, her tired eyes masked by caffeine intake.

I appreciate the effort that went into putting our house back together, a gesture from a friend who cares about us. But it still feels like three thousand square feet of quiet devastation in here. I close my eyes and imagine Leon at his desk looking out his window at my mother's apartment. If I concentrate, I can remember what Rory's unsteady footsteps sounded like on the hardwood floor in our hallway, and how when she first started walking, her excited voice echoed in the halls.

I walk to our bedroom and lift Emily's pillow from the bed, pressing it against my face and inhaling the scent of her that still lingers there on the cotton.

 _Any minute now, Emily is going to bound through the front door with the kids._

 _Any minute now, I'll hear my mother banging around our kitchen and Chris's voice will fill the living room as he helps Leon with his homework._

 _Any minute now, laughter is going to fill this house again._

I'm distracted from my fantasy world when Rossi clears his throat. He stands in the bedroom doorway, his eyes sympathetic and sad and scared, and probably a pretty close reflection of my own, minus the total desolation that I'm sure shows on my own face.

"We should get you packed up, Derek." It's said in a soothing whisper, a voice I've never quite heard from his mouth.

I nod and put the pillow back on the bed. I blink back tears at the memory of Emily's lips turning up in a sleepy smile every morning when the alarm goes off, how happy she was just to start her day – any and every day – with me and our family.

I go to the hallway and open the large storage closet, retrieving two suitcases and a small duffel bag. Last night, I hastily grabbed a change of clothes for me and the kids and Emily, along with some diapers. Tonight, I need to pack for the potential of a longer time away from home, and the clothes I pack for Emily will be pretense, smoke and mirrors to make it look like she's with us.

I hand the duffel bag to Rossi, along with the key to Chris's cabin. "Can you make sure to grab the books from his bedside table? Those are the ones he hasn't read yet. And his reading glasses."

Rossi nods and heads downstairs. I go into Rory's room and try not to think too much as I grab her favorite blanket from her crib, placing that in the suitcase first. There's not an incredible rush here, but we don't have much time to waste. From here, we're going to the hospital to pick up Chris. Then we're going back to Rossi's to get Leon and Rory. And then we're driving to Delaware.

This plan hinges on the two newest members of the BAU buying into the fact that Hotch has placed our entire family in protective custody, when in actuality we won't be in a safe house, but in a mansion on the water in Delaware. The safe house is only a measure of security, just in case the people who have my mother are more sophisticated than we believe they are. The family who owns the home in Delaware, where Andrew, Chris's best friend, is the groundskeeper, has gone back to their regular home for the fall and winter, and he's agreed to help hide us.

The plan is based on deceit and breaking a hundred different laws and getting our family out of town before anyone realizes Emily isn't with us. It's not that the BAU's newest members aren't talented and trustworthy; they're just not family the way we all are, and our plan is for family only.

This plan relies on Leon keeping up a lie if anyone ever asks, that Emily was with us the whole time. I'll be the one to break that news to him in a little bit. Emily and I hated the decision, but the alternatives weren't much better; separating who was left of our family any more was unconscionable. She's trusting me to keep Rory and Leon and her father safe, and I'm counting on her to bring my mother and herself home.

It sounds like a simple division of duties of husband and wife when I think of it that way, but it's not simple at all. It's gut-wrenching and anguishing; I'm angry enough to punch a hole in the wall of our perfect home, and sad enough to curl up on Leon's bed instead of packing his clothing, broken enough to cry until this is all over.

Four days. Emily's given herself four days. I wanted to be the one who went, but it wouldn't have worked. She's the one with connections in Europe, and I'm once again sitting this out. I stuff Leon's clothing in the suitcase and try to rationalize a way out of this one, finding nothing to grasp onto.

Last night, or rather, very early this morning, Emily and Hotch showed up at Rossi's. The first thing I noticed was one of my old gym bags on her shoulder, the indicator that she'd gone home before returning here after being at the hospital with Chris. The second thing I noticed was her hard exterior and the seriousness on her face – a look I hadn't seen her wear in over two years.

When she caught my eyes, she visibly tried to soften for me, to relax her shoulders, to tell me she loved me with her eyes.

On my part, I was emotionally lost by the time she arrived, feeling so much grief and fear and anger that I didn't know how to feel anything at all. I couldn't believe my mother was gone, couldn't believe this had happened at all. _This has to be a nightmare._ I'm not sure how many times I said that in my head over the course of several hours, as Penelope set up her laptops on Rossi's kitchen table, as the team converged around and started talking, as JJ barreled through the door with tears in her eyes, as I hugged Leon to my side with one arm and swayed Rory back to sleep with my other.

I'd gotten Rory and Leon settled and asleep again on the pull-out couch in Rossi's den about two hours before Emily returned from the hospital. I didn't want them upstairs without me; I couldn't bear to be more than a couple of feet away from them. I laid there with them, Rory between me and Leon, my arm around both, until they settled into sleep. Then I eased myself off the bed, lined a couple of pillows down the side of the bed so Rory couldn't roll off, and walked quietly back into Rossi's kitchen where a full blown investigation was underway.

We knew some things at that point, and we had deductive guesses for the things we didn't know. Much of the early investigation had been lead and predicted correctly by Emily via the phone while she was at the hospital with her father.

The rapid DNA test results came back from the scraping they'd done under Chris' nails, and Emily was right – the DNA matched the DNA found on the body of two little boys who had been murdered two years before in New York. We deduced that it was likely the same man who helped hold and transport me to Europe two years ago – the younger man who was with Robert Daniels.

It seemed improbable that not a trace of Patrick Joyce's DNA was found in that bathroom in a courthouse in London. Improbable enough to presume he had escaped a few days prior with help.

The two matters – the DNA found on Chris and Patrick escaping prison - were too much of a coincidence to dismiss. And regardless of how scared he was or how dark it was outside, I trusted Leon when he said that the man he saw in the driveway of our home looked like Patrick.

We hadn't located the blue van anywhere yet.

At the time, we believed my mother to be in the air somewhere. Four private jets with flight plans left the DC area within two hours of my mother's abduction, but none of them seemed a likely candidate for carrying my mother off to another place. When we started expanding the search for airfields outside the DC area, the list got long and complicated and impossible. We didn't know the resources these people had, we didn't know if they were jet hopping, we didn't know their final destination.

About an hour before Hotch and Emily showed up at Rossi's, Hotch called and ordered the BAU home to get a few hours of rest. He stated we didn't know enough yet to delve further at the time, and we needed to come back with fresh eyes in the morning. It was out of character for Hotch at this stage of an investigation, but his tone and his order at this crucial moment spoke volumes. At least it did for our BAU family, but not for the two newest member. The team hung around me as the two new members headed out the door, giving everyone the time to say their private "Goodnights" to me.

As soon as they pulled away from Rossi's house, Rossi and Penelope and JJ sat back down at the kitchen table as if Hotch had never given an order at all.

Several video files came through from Marcus Klaus, and we spread out the laptops and watched.

"There," JJ said as she watched footage at the courthouse. The woman was barely on the screen, just a glimpse of profile and red, curly hair as she bent forward clutching her stomach and then nodded slightly at the bathroom door nearest Patrick Joyce as he entered the courthouse. Once Patrick was let into the bathroom, the woman slid out of camera view and disappeared.

That one was an easy find. But we all had to scroll through separate footage at double speed for nearly forty minutes - footage of when Adrian Stancu was in a hospital for surgery on two occasions, after being beaten and gang raped in prison - before the next find. It was Penelope who spotted her. The red hair was tucked into a surgical cap, and she was wearing a nurse's uniform. She walked confidently in the hallways and entered Adrian's room. It was on her exit, right by the elevator that she made the mistake of turning her face to the side. The upturned nose, the jawline, the eyebrows and shape of the eyes - they were the same as the woman in the courthouse right before Patrick exploded.

Penelope called Hotch, Reid and Emily on speaker phone, quickly blurting out our findings. Hotch cut her off with a somber, "We're almost there," before disconnecting.

We were discussing the possibilities of Hotch's tone when he and Emily arrived. Rather, the team was discussing the possibilities and I felt like I was floating away from it all, wishing for the nightmare from which I would soon awake.

Then Emily was there, but she was also gone. I could see it in her eyes, and I must have reflected something similar back to her, because her eyes darkened and she blinked in a way that seemed like an apology. An apology for what was lost, or an apology for what was to come, I didn't know at the time.

I know now - it was both.

Emily wanted to look in at the kids before joining the discussion swirling around Rossi's kitchen. I took her hand and guided her the few feet to the den. She glanced at Rory and Leon sleeping peacefully next to each other on the bed and bent over to brush barely-there kisses on their cheeks that wouldn't wake them. She stood and faced me and I searched her eyes again.

Her lips on mine were a soft benediction. The way her hands curved around my cheeks were a brief reprieve for my heart that was in shreds. The way her arms squeezed around me were a reminder to not let go. So I didn't. I held her. I held her and we comforted each other quietly while our children slept on a sofa bed right beside us.

"What's in the bag?" I whispered in the ear of my beautiful wife. Those were the desperate words that escaped my mouth in the moment, even though a part of me already knew the answer.

She pulled away from me slightly, her eyes meeting mine, answering me without words.

"No." It was a vehement whisper, a desperate attempt to cut my losses.

But how can anyone really play the game of picking and choosing in a situation like this? I tried though. I tried to lie my way to keeping Emily safely with me. "My mother would tell us she was old. My mother would tell us she had a good life, and the past two years had been the best ever. She would tell us to protect the kids, to not negotiate, to run and never look back."

I didn't realize I was crying until Emily's hands were brushing my tears away. "Could you live with that?" she asked.

Her tone said she was leaving it up to me and at that moment, I said nothing at all. The lump in my throat was nearly impossible to swallow past, and I wasn't ready to make a decision. I kept quiet in that moment and so did everyone else.

But it felt like something had already been spoken to the team while Emily and I were in the den.

The only person who left Rossi's house that night was JJ. It was nearly four o'clock in the morning when she departed and Rossi headed up to his bed while Hotch and Penelope found places to sleep in the living room for a few hours. I quietly handed Emily her pajamas I'd grabbed from the house and took note of the grass stains on her knees as she stripped off the dark purple dress she'd worn at her birthday dinner. We completed the mundane routine of getting ready for bed in silence, both of us searching the bathroom mirror for the people we were less than twelve hours before.

We crawled into the small sofa bed with Rory and Leon. It was a tight fit with me against Leon and Emily against Rory and our arms reaching out to touch each other and surround our children. The faint light from the kitchen was enough for us to see by, to stare at each other and try to communicate a litany of fear and sadness, understanding and a confusing future, without saying any words at all.

Our eyes never drooped or looked away from each other. We didn't shed a tear. We held our children and we stared and we thought, suspended in a space together that was so wholly shattering that there weren't words in the dictionary that could possibly encompass our emotions.

I think she knew when I came to the same conclusion she'd been at for several hours. When Rory started fussing just as dawn was breaking and Leon was still sleeping soundly, Emily lifted her pajama shirt and pulled Rory towards her. Rory latched on and quieted immediately and every single second of the past two years played behind my eyes.

I finally glanced slightly away from her eyes to catch a glimpse of mother and daughter. When I looked back up, tears were rolling down her face, and we shared a look of understanding. I was almost there, but I couldn't let go yet.

Thirty minutes later, when Rory was back asleep and Emily and I still hadn't exchanged a word, my cell phone buzzed. I reached over and grabbed it off the floor.

The message was a short, "In a few days we'll request our ransom in exchange for getting her back alive. Don't involve the police or the FBI."

The picture attached told a thousand words. She'd only been gone for ten hours at that point, but my mother more closely resembled a prisoner of war than Fran Morgan in that first picture they sent us. Against a dark, obscured background, tied up and naked, with a nasty bump and dried blood on her head and frightened eyes, she seemed to be telling me anything but, "Just let me go."

I rolled from the sofa bed, phone still clutched in my hand. I landed on plush carpet and I couldn't even walk from the room; I crawled quickly before the sob in my throat could wake and frighten Rory and Leon. Between the kitchen island and a cabinet, I came to a rest, Emily right behind me and Penelope already at the kitchen table on her computer, crying and searching, because our phones had already been synced to her equipment and she'd seen the picture, too.

In two years of living together, Emily and I had never even had so much as a simple tiff. That fight could have been epic, but I think we both silently acknowledged the inevitable through our grief. We could have exchanged harsh words we'd later wish we could take back, or we could hold those back and reach our conclusion lovingly.

She glanced at the picture on my phone, she moved herself and seated herself on my legs, she wrapped her arms around me. Penelope muttered, "This picture bounced all over the place before getting to your phone."

My shouted, "There's no way in fucking hell you're leaving us!" came out as harsh fingertips digging into Emily's back.

"It won't be like last time," she whispered back with actual words. "They're small, maybe only three people, likely no more than five. They aren't hanging out in clubs. I'm not going in to go undercover with them _or_ to arrest them."

My chin dug harshly into her shoulder as I nodded. I knew this wouldn't be a standard arrest, and wouldn't be by the books. She wanted our lives back without having to be scared anymore. People broke out of prison or got released on technicalities all the time. She was going for no loose ends. The last time she tried something like that, she'd ended up nearly dead with a stake in her abdomen.

"Take someone?" I whispered desperately. Even then, I knew it couldn't be me. We couldn't both leave Rory and Leon. It was impossible to even think of.

"They can't," she whispered back, gripping me harder.

"They would."

"There would be no way to cover them being gone from Headquarters without implicating all of us when this ends. I need to be a ghost. I have Clyde's list to help me be one. I'm not sure if I'll be able to find her, but I have to try. They didn't want her…"

Her whisper trailed off in my ear, and I didn't need her to finish; I'd already written the story in my mind while staring at her eyes over our children while laying on an uncomfortable sofa bed. Whatever their original plans were for Rory and Leon, they've been altered now. If emotional duress and torture were their intended goal, the torture portion with an elderly woman would change, the timeline would be shortened, and they wouldn't just let her come home. They'd presume she remembered too much, heard too much, knew too much.

I was maybe out of my mind in that moment, or I was desperate, or just crazy and grief stricken.

As Hotch and Rossi emerged in the kitchen, over an hour before the two new members of the BAU arrived, and while Reid was still at the hospital with Chris, I pushed Emily until she was standing, then stood myself. I grabbed her hand and pulled her towards the small half-bathroom we'd changed in a few hours before.

Among a bed of towels on the floor, I found solace in her arms. It was terrible and necessary at the same time. The two of us had found peace in our skin against each other before, and I needed it again before she left. I needed to remember what I'd already memorized - the slope of her shoulders and the curve of her hips; the hollow on her throat before it met collar bone that I'd spent hundreds of moments with my lips against over the past two years. I needed to feel her lips soft and pliant under mine and breathe in her sighs and sorrow.

I needed to be inside her when I made her look me in the eyes. "Promise me we'll have tomorrow," I demanded with a whisper that was demanding if barely audible.

And she met my eyes and held them. "Tomorrow and next week and next year and forever. I promise..."

 _Tomorrow and next week and next year and forever. I promise._ That's what she'd said to me as her head rested against ridiculously expensive towels on Rossi's bathroom floor. Not an ideal place for a private goodbye, but it was what we had in the moment.

I remember and hold onto the conviction in her voice, cradling my ear slightly for a moment, like if I let go I might lose her forever. I throw Emily's favorite sweater on the top of the pile of clothes in the suitcase, and then stuff her pillow in there for good measure.

As I zip the suitcase, Rossi appears in our bedroom doorway again, the duffel bag now full and over his shoulder. He grabs the suitcase containing the kid's clothing, and I grab the one containing mine and Emily's. I reach my hand out towards the dresser and grab Chris' journal that he gave Emily over a year ago.

"One more stop," I say as we descend the stairs.

I stop in the kitchen and set the alarm. I use all of the sixty seconds I have before I have to get out the door, inhaling the scent and the memory of our home, and then we leave, locking the door and descending the front steps.

I head towards the garage while Rossi takes the suitcases to the Suburban.

I grab an ice chest and open the freezer out there. I grab ice packs, and then I take as much breastmilk as I can fit, knowing that Rory could never possibly go through it in a few days. I don't care. It's a tangible part of Emily that will be with us, and I'll take every ounce I can.

"Are you okay?"

The voice from the garage door startles me even though I recognize it immediately. I take a deep breath and turn to face our neighbor, Rick. Just four days ago, he and his wife and daughter were in our backyard with us, celebrating Emily's birthday.

I smile convincingly. "We are. Someone attempted to break in when the kids and our parents were home last night. The police are investigating. We're all a bit shaken up, so we're going to head to Chicago to visit my sisters for a few days to regroup. But we're okay. We'll be back on Monday."

Rick nods, buying my lie hook, line and sinker.

"Holy shit. I'm so sorry that happened. We saw the police cars last night and the ambulance and didn't know what to think. The police wouldn't let us near the place."

I nod, just wanting him to go. "Chris fell. He's okay."

I manage the small talk, accept the condolences and wishes of good will from our neighbor for about two more minutes before Rossi appears in the garage. "We need to go get the rest of the crew and head towards the airport if you're going to make your flight," he says casually.

I nod. Rick shakes both our hands. And we're in the car heading towards the hospital and Chris.

I sink my head back against the passenger seat and close my eyes.

 _Any minute now._

 _Any minute now, I'm going to gasp awake from a nightmare with my heart thudding and find Emily in bed next to me._

 _Any minute now, Emily's going to wake up and wrap her arms around me and soothe and reassure me back to sleep._

 _Any minute now._

I open my eyes and blink out the car window, acknowledging this isn't a nightmare I'm going to wake up from any minute now.

My fingers reach under the collar of my shirt to clasp onto the platinum necklace that holds the the pendant I gave Emily for her birthday, along with her wedding and engagement rings. I finger the metal and precious stones while my other hand reaches into my back pocket to retrieve the burn phone. It's a phone identical to the one every member of our family has now.

" _I'm going with her,"_ is the simple four-word text message on my screen that I've read several times in the past few hours. I find a bit of relief and consolation, along with a measure of additional gripping fear, at those words.


	6. Chapter 6

_Marietta was furious, wild and crazy in her rage. When we got back to the house, she slapped Embry several times. Then she slapped me. Then she slapped Fran Morgan, who could do no more than moan quietly in her drugged state._

" _They'll pay," Embry said meekly. "They'll pay the same amount for her as they would the kids. I watched them all summer. They dote on her."_

" _That's not the point!" Marietta screeched. "I wanted them to suffer forever. I wanted their money and I wanted them to have to deal with the mess their children were because of what we did to them!"_

 _I cringed slightly at the thought, thankful that that little boy and baby girl had gotten away. I didn't know who the hell I was with all these feelings of compassion._

 _I watched as a veil settled over Marietta's eyes. They moved frantically from side to side while she thought. "She'll have to die," Marietta finally said, her lips slightly snarled. "We'll play with them for a few days, then we'll request the money transfer. Once we have it, we'll let them find her dead. They'll never get over it or get passed it. They'll be heartbroken and ruined. It won't be quite the same, but it can work."_

 _Embry let out a breath of a relief at those words and Marietta's eyes snapped to him. "You'll be punished for your mistake."_

 _She turned to look at me and nodded slightly. I'd done my part well, and she wasn't angry with me. "Adrian's down with Holly. Take her to the play room. Get her stripped and tied up. Take a picture. Use the computer in my research room to send it like I showed you; it will be untraceable. Embry and I have some business to take care of upstairs."_

 _Embry whimpered slightly and then stopped himself. Marietta reached her arm out like she was going to hit him again, and instead she slapped Fran again. I put my arm around the drugged woman and caught her before she could fall down. "As you wish," I said to Marietta, wanting to get Fran out of there before Marietta could hit her again._

 _I did as I was told, swiftly and efficiently. The doors to the cellar were open and unlocked, as was the playroom door. As I stripped Fran down as gently as I could, I heard the faint sounds of Embry howling in pain filter down the stairs._

 _I put a naked Fran in shackles and handcuffs and strung her arms up so they were hooked on the wall._

" _I'm going to need you to look at the camera, Fran," I said._

 _She shivered at my voice and tears filled her eyes. I did what I was told, and I'd continue to do it for now, until I found a break or opportunity to escape. I looked at Fran through the camera lens and felt my heart breaking at her frightened, tear-soaked face._

 _Who was I and what were these emotions? I barely remembered this version of me, the empathetic eighteen-year-old who entered the grounds of Oxford with the intent of becoming a Chemistry Professor. Cocaine and other drugs and Adrian and an ill-fated night where I raped a child while Adrian recorded it changed that. I became harder, vicious, and brainwashed._

 _Twelve years in prison had broken the spell. I wasn't sure I would ever be anything more than a criminal, but I didn't want to be one like this._

 _I snapped the picture, like I was told. Then I left Fran in the room to send it. But before I got outside of the room, I whispered, "I'm sorry for this."_

 _I didn't tack on a preemptive apology for what was to come. Marietta would likely have her fun with Fran before this was over._

 _XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX_

* * *

 _Derek was in our bathroom taking a shower, Leon was at school and I'd just put four-week old Rory down in her basinet. I smelled like breast milk and baby and happiness. Curiosity and longing drove me to the partially-opened door of our bathroom._

 _Steam billowed above the clear shower doors, but hadn't yet clung to the glass to obscure the view. He stood under the spray of warm water after his workout, his head bent down, chin on chest, eyes closed and one hand on his erection while the other firmly pressed against the tile wall._

 _I smiled softly at the image. Four weeks without any sort of sexual intimacy was taking its toll on both of us, even though my body wasn't quite ready to engage in such acts. Still, after the year we'd had together, not having his body around mine or in mine for so long was starting to feel like a dull ache._

 _We communicated with words and touches and our eyes. We communicated in laughter and smiles and hums of contentment._

 _And we communicated with our bodies; both of us for whom sex was strife with trust issues had found a safe haven with each other._

 _I stripped off my clothing in the bedroom and crept slowly into the bathroom, leaving the door open wide so I could hear Rory if she woke up. So focused on his task, he never looked up. It wasn't until the glass door rattled as I slid it open that he startled and opened his eyes. He looked almost embarrassed, and I laughed quietly as I stepped into the shower, a towel in my hand that I quickly slung over the shower door._

 _His hand now hung limply at his side as he took in my body, his eyes starting at my feet and traveling up slowly. I was curious what he would think since I was just starting on the road to a post-pregnancy body. There had d been almost no opportunities for him to have full-on view since I'd given birth, and sometimes I didn't know what to think of myself when I looked in the mirror. But his eyes moved up my legs that could definitely use a razor, to the juncture between my legs - a jungle that would probably require a very generous tip when I went in to get waxed in the next week - to the looser skin on my stomach and a handful of stretch marks that were still angry red, to my heavy breasts and much larger nipples, before finally landing on my eyes._

 _The desire on his face was palpable. The love reached out with invisible arms and surrounded me. I smiled and blinked back tears at the raw longing and acceptance on his face. It wasn't even just acceptance, it was delight. My changed body was part of our journey and he loved and wanted it all._

 _I quirked a small smile at him and reached my hand towards him, still hard, even harder than before. I ran my finger from base to tip and he groaned. "You're playing with fire," he mumbled as his forehead dropped to my shoulder._

 _I startled at his figure of speech for a second, the word "fire" being something that we carefully tiptoed around. But it was just a figure of speech, and the best his beautiful, aroused mind could come up with in the moment. I smiled and kissed his neck, my free arm wrapping around his waist to squeeze him to me tightly for a moment. Then I grabbed the towel where it hung near me and dropped it on the tile floor. I kissed my way down his chest as I dropped to my knees on the towel._

" _Em…" he whispered in restraint. "I can wait."_

 _I shook my head and looked up at him. "The one advantage of playing with fire is that one never gets even singed. It is the people who don't know how to play with it who get burned up."_

 _I engulfed him in my mouth, and he groaned in relief, "Oscar Wilde?"_

 _I laughed lightly then, my mouth around the pulsing heat of him, just thankful to have that type of closeness to him again after a four-week hiatus..._

I've thought about that Oscar Wilde quote several times in the past twenty-four hours.

I'm thinking about it now as I stare at the empty field where there was once a mansion. The road to the house in Theydon Garnon that I shared with Clyde, Penelope and Derek over two years ago is not that far off the path of where we're heading, and our borrowed car seemed to veer there of its own accord. The gate and driveway still stands, but the area that once held a beautiful home that was burned to ashes has been cleared, like the estate never existed. Though the owners were given the money to rebuild, it appears they haven't started the process.

I sigh at the sight, sadness about Clyde and the memories of that house swirling around me, and a familiar sigh from the passenger seat echos mine.

"We should go," says the soothing voice.

I nod and put the car into drive again, heading down the road towards our destination. A hand touches my shoulder, squeezing gently, then it's gone again. I turn on the radio, just for something to do.

This car is a disaster, just like the man we borrowed it from is currently a disaster - garbage stuffed in crevices, a fine sheen of ashes on the dashboard from chain smoking, and smudged, dirty mirrors that make it difficult to navigate through the fog that hangs thickly in the air like a second skin.

 _Maybe we all just played with fire a little too long,_ I think.

Last night, I was having the same morose thought in the quiet corner of a bar in the international terminal at Dulles. I stared down into a cup of black coffee, my carry-on with Clyde's tactical jacket and a change of clothes stuffed between my feet under the table. In combat-like boots that were stiff enough to loathe, jeans and a black turtleneck, tired eyes and my hair pulled back, I'm sure I looked like a harsh, yet broken middle-aged woman.

I thought about playing with fire too much. I thought about how many lives I could possibly have. Was I at my ninth yet? I was cutting it close.

I thought about the note left in our home. _Time to Pay the Piper._ It was written in confusing, almost child-like print. The Pied Piper of Hamelin was something my Grandfather often read to me when I was younger. He seemed to find pleasure in the darker aspects of children's stories when I was young, nastily snarling and reveling in the fate of the antagonist or protagonist, depending on his mood.

Thinking about children's stories with morals made me remember the weekly little gym classes I'd started taking Rory to, and how the instructor would sing silly songs and rhymes, her favorite being Little Bunny Foo Foo. She enthusiastically sang about that bunny picking up the field mice and bopping them on the head.

I half expected the Good Fairy to pop up from behind the bar at the airport and tell me I'd used up all my chances.

I thought about happiness, and how Derek and I had been acting like we were just any other married couple, without a lengthy history of people who might want revenge. That it was these people - ones associated with Adrian Stancu - was just coincidence. They'd gotten to us first, but that didn't mean others weren't out there waiting in line.

 _We've been playing house like happiness was made of impenetrable titanium, but happiness is a fragile thread for people like us_ , I thought there in that bar as I poured cream into my mug and tried to stir the coffee into a murky submissiveness I could swallow.

I'd spent the better part of ten hours at Rossi's with Derek acting like there was nothing that could touch me, that I would go to London, fetch Fran from wherever she was, bring her home, and life would resume. And he'd spent the better part of ten hours not calling me on my bullshit and holding in his anger and fear.

All and all, not the greatest of goodbyes, aside from about twenty minutes on the floor of Rossi's downstairs bathroom.

I felt bereft without my wedding and engagement ring on my finger. I felt like my arms had been cut off and I was still reaching for my children without limbs with which to do so while I sat staring at that mug of coffee. And I knew I couldn't live this devastation. I needed to focus on my anger. My anger and compelling need for vengeance was what would get me and Fran back home. I didn't have time to be soft or sad or loving or heart broken.

I caught the eye of the server to ask her for bourbon instead of coffee, but before I could get the words out of my mouth, a glass with ice cubes and soothing brown liquid was placed before me. "Is this seat taken?"

She looked slightly different with several inches of her hair gone; she looked like the woman I'd seen when I returned from Paris in 2011. We knew each other so well that when we met for lunch during the work week in DC, whoever was there first could order for the other. We'd spent so many hours together, especially since Rory had been born. She knew where every dish and appliance and utensil was in my kitchen. She knew where we kept the extra toilet paper and what Leon was doing in school. She knew how to rock Rory to sleep and where we kept the extra batteries for the TV remote.

I quickly pushed down my softness at seeing her face and hissed out, "What are you doing here?" not quite able to meet her eyes with my harsh tone.

"Coming with you," JJ said simply as she sat down at the chair on the other side of the table.

I shook my head immediately. "You can't."

"My boarding pass says otherwise," she said.

I lowered my voice even further, "JJ, you can't fly with your passport."

She smirked. "I spent seven months flying to Paris or London as Jennifer Jareau. After that it was fake passports all the way to deliver me to that hellhole in the middle east. When I got out of that mess, I decided to hold a few IDs back, in case I ever needed to pull an Emily. I had my own Ian Doyle out there at that point, remember? And relax about it. I think the only person who ever could have known the names on those IDs is dead."

That last sentence was delivered with the JJ kindness I knew, but her voice left no room for debate. I wasn't going to argue with her and get her to stay off the plane. I wasn't going to be able to reason with her. She was coming with me, and she'd either follow me wherever I went, or she'd be right by my side if I let her.

Still, I tried. "What about work?" I asked.

She didn't miss a beat. "My mother fell and broke her leg. I'm taking a few days off to help care for her."

I tried again. I glanced around the bar to make sure we still had privacy. "Are you sure you understand what I'm going there for?"

"Yep," she said while taking a swig of her own drink. Bourbon, too. She never drank the stuff. "Fran and no loose ends. I understand. I'm in."

I shook my head again. I leaned forward so no one besides the two of us even had the chance to overhear. I hissed, "You understand in the context of the heat of the moment. The whole team does. This is premeditated, and it's different."

She shrugged, not put off by my words. "Have you ever done something like this before, other than Doyle?" she asked.

 _Once,_ I thought. _Once when I was still in my late twenties and fresh at Interpol. I'd spent the better part of two months looking at dead children, used and discarded. I went undercover to find the unsub, and when I knew we had him, and I knew what I needed to do to make an arrest, I baited him. I dreamed about killing the man, and I manipulated the situation on purpose, so that he'd pull a knife on me and I could snap his neck. He died and I walked away with a scratch on my arm. Clyde knew what I'd done, and while I was feeling a little lost after the case was over, he showed up at my flat with a bottle of wine, a quiet gesture of saying, "I would have done the same thing."_

"Once," I said out loud to JJ.

"I'm in," she repeated, like the idea of going after the unsubs in this circumstance with the mind of a killer instead of the mind of an investigator was no big deal to her; my heart was in turmoil about the whole thing. JJ, who had an uncanny ability to balance hardness and softness was sitting before me telling me that whatever my sketchy plan was didn't bother her. She was trying to get on the plane with me.

I took a gulp of my drink and eyed her. I took in some air, preparing to speak again, to try a different angle, and she cut me off before I had the chance.

"The real question, Emily, is not why I want to come. I can list the reasons for you. I owe you for me and Will. I want our lives back to how they were as much as you do. I love Fran and I'm only a notch less pissed off than you are about this whole thing. _You_ are part of my family. _You_ are my sister when I never thought I'd let myself feel like that about any friend ever again. Nearly three years ago, I stood chained up and wished and hoped with everything in me that Hotch would call you. He did, and you came without a second thought. So why I'm coming with you is moot. The real question is why you don't want me with you now, and don't argue that it's about my sensibilities regarding right and wrong. I flung a man off a roof and you were there to catch me before I fell. So what is it?"

I stared at her and took in her words. I swirled the liquid around in my glass. I hedged. "I don't want you to get hurt. I couldn't stand it if you got hurt. You have a family, too. Will is probably pissed off right now and just wanting you to turn around and go straight back home."

Her lips lifted slightly, like she knew I'd say that first. "Wrong answer. Will is pissed and scared, but he acquiesced to the inevitable without a fight because he didn't want to send me off with harsh words. Just like Derek did with you. "

The tears that burned my eyes only made me angrier and more desperate than I already was. "I want you around for my family if I don't make it back."

Her hand touched mine. "Bullshit. You know you're coming home. You're second guessing it right now, but you know in your heart there's no way in fuck you're going to risk your life to the point that you put in question getting yourself back to Derek and Rory and Leon. It's the reason Derek let you go, because no matter how scared he is right now, deep down he knows you'd never let him or the kids go. Try again."

I huffed out a light, bitter laugh despite myself. I drained my glass for a little liquid courage, knowing this was going to come out at some point, and deciding I wanted to rip off the proverbial bandaid. "Because I don't know how to be who I need to be for this while I'm tagging along with someone who knows who I am now. I need to forget that Emily if I'm going to do what I need to do."

Her slight smile was one of acceptance and understanding, the answer she'd been looking for all along. "No, you don't. Or if you do, that's okay, too. I can be there to help you remember or forget her, but I'm not letting you go alone," was the immediate reply.

I surveyed her and chomped on a piece of ice as the loudspeaker crackled, "Flight 714 to London is now boarding."

"You're a real piece of work," I said as I stood and grabbed my bag. I started walking a few steps and turned to ask her if she was coming, but she was already there, a bag similar to mine slung over her shoulder.

"What seat do you have?" I asked instead.

"2A. What about you?"

I raised an eyebrow at her first class ticket. "Penelope?"

She tilted her head. "It pays to have certain friends."

 _Jane Irwin, please come to the check-in counter._ I was only vaguely aware of the loud speaker crackling again as I looked at JJ's face, feeling terrible about her coming with me, but thankful in the deepest recesses of my heart.

JJ nudged me in the ribs with her elbow. "That's you," she said.

Yes, that was what my passport currently said my name was. I made my way to the counter by the gate and was told about my changed seat assignment. The woman smiled at me as she handed me a new boarding pass. 2B.

The satisfied smile on JJ's face was a distraction. A distraction that I didn't know quite how to contend with. And then I remembered JJ kicking ass when she needed to, and how she'd always curbed the balance between right and wrong, and how I trusted her to not lead me astray. Which meant, if she was here in these circumstances, she thought I was doing the right thing.

There was an immense amount of comfort in that.

I didn't know how to deal with comfort in circumstances such as these. I still don't as she sits beside me in a slovenly Volkswagen and we pull away from Theydon Garnon and make our way towards "Gil."

There were seven names on Clyde's list. Six of them had first and last names, along with one or two aliases and one or two numbers.

And then there was Gil. Just that as a name, a star next to it, and a single phone number. We didn't start with calling that number, though.

We spent the first hour of the flight talking about options and trust before succumbing to a handful of hours of much-needed sleep.

Trust born of loyalty and love and understanding was real. Trust born of debt was fragile, something only to be relied upon until a person needed to save him or herself by giving you up. I trusted Marcus Klaus, but I didn't want to put his job in jeopardy; asking him to help me would be a lot like letting Hotch come with me - his absence would be noted. My trust in the people I knew at Interpol was questionable when push came to shove. That left one person.

We arrived in London a little after eight o'clock this morning and took a cab to Nick Hansen's flat. Nick and Clyde had been an on again, off again item for years. Nick had already proven his loyalty by not selling me out when reporting the story about Adrian Stancu and the whole Minotaur case. And I knew Nick had been approached by a publisher about writing an autobiography about Adrian Stancu a little over a year ago. His communication with me fizzled after that, but I still trusted him as our best shot, a man who had access to research we needed that might lead us to the woman with red hair and a location for Fran.

We took a cab to his flat, a flat I'd been to for dinner on a couple of occasions with Clyde. The man who answered the door looked like a mess; his once impeccable flat looked like a frat house. I could see dirty dishes and piles of papers scattered about; I could smell the scent of stale marijuana. I may have left London and left the case from two years ago behind to start a better, happier life, but Nick had somehow gotten himself lost on the way.

His red-rimmed eyes took me in for several long seconds. "Emily?" he asked.

I nodded and he let me and JJ into the flat without further words.

I surveyed him and surveyed the mess and he looked embarrassed. I smiled softly at him. "I'm sorry about the mess," he muttered.

I shook my head. "Don't worry about it." More quietly, I said, "We need your help."

Nick hastily cleared off his couch and one arm chair so we could sit. JJ kept casting furtive glances at me, like perhaps Nick wasn't our best bet as to someone we could trust. But I knew the man, and I knew behind whatever a mess he currently was, there stood a heart of gold, and a man with discretion who wouldn't say a word about me being in London, even if he couldn't help us much more than with just information.

I told him the whole story, laid it out honestly - what had happened, why we were there, my intended outcome. And as I spoke, Nick came back to himself somewhat, looking a little more alert and a little more together.

"I tried to write the book," he said when I was done talking. "I tried. I took the deal from the publisher and started my research, intending to dedicate the book to Clyde. But the further I dug and the more I found out, the more I fell into depression. That those people could live like they did and that Clyde died because of it was too much. I stopped my research."

He paused and took a breath. "I was fired from my job a few months ago. I was useless at that point, not able to produce a single story. What do you need? I'll do whatever I can to help you."

"Do you still know how to fly?" I asked him. Clyde had taught him, years ago, first a helicopter, and then a plane.

Nick nodded. "My pilot's license is still good."

I nodded back at him. I wanted to talk to him more, to help him, to hug him, but we didn't have time for any of that. "I need you to get cleaned up. I need your research, especially anything with Adrian's past. Garcia is currently going through his financials to see if there's a discrepancy we missed. We need to find the woman with red hair. She was special to Adrian for some reason, and we need to know why. I might need you to fly. Right now, I need to use your phone and borrow your car."

Nick stood immediately. He handed me his keys and pointed to his phone. "I'm going to shower. My research is a mess, but I'll gather it for you. I'll get the guest room cleaned up for you both."

I stood as well. I couldn't let him go without giving him something. "I scattered Clyde's ashes in the Potomac. I'm sorry. I should have called you. I should have let you be there. I can help you get back on your feet when this is over."

I watched tears fill his eyes. He nodded and turned, walked down the hall. A few minutes later, I heard a shower start.

I looked at JJ who had been silent the entire time. "Are you sure he's up for this?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. Trust was born of loyalty more than debt. I was the recipient of Nick's loyalty via his loyalty to Clyde. It was once-removed, but it was there. "He'll get it together."

I reached for Nick's phone and dialed Gil's number, putting it on speaker so JJ could hear, too, not sure what to expect when he answered.

"Hello?" a gruff, surprised voice answered.

"I'm looking for Gil," I said.

"And I assume I'm talking to Emily?" he responded, a little less gruff.

The frankness surprised me and I paused. He chuckled slightly over the line. "Only one person ever had this number, and then he came to me and said he was giving it to you, a little over two years ago. I don't like to share information over the phone."

He rattled off an address and we agreed to meet at noon.

Now, as JJ and I drive over English country roads and get closer to Gil's address, I'm filled with anticipation. Anticipation for help, anticipation for meeting this mystery man, anticipation for finding Fran.

A small castle-like structure looms in front of us and I say to JJ, "I think that's it."

She stares. "You've got to be kidding me. Is there a moat?"

I smile.

We pull the car to a stop in front of a gate and it opens immediately. We drive down the path of the lengthy driveway in silence, taking in the impressive structure before us, complete with turrets.

Mentally my mind makes a picture of what Gil looks like based on his house. I'm imagining a distinguished man in a suit as we make our way out of the car and to his front door. When it opens, I realize how wrong I was about my perception of this man. My first thought is _Jerry Garcia_.

"Gil?" I ask and he nods.

The man is in his sixties, with a scraggly beard and wild hair nods. He's barefoot, wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt and faded jeans. I half expect him to present me with a bong before he whips out a guitar and breaks out into a rendition of _Uncle John's Band_.

Instead, he steps out of his doorway and wraps me in a hug.

"Well, this should be interesting," JJ mumbles loud enough for me to hear.

Despite myself and my inner turmoil and fear and anger, I laugh slightly.

I'm glad she's with me. More than glad.


	7. Chapter 7

_A/N - So very sorry about the delay. It was a hellish week of work deadlines, single parenthood while my better half was at a conference, and food poisoning...the proverbial cherry on top!_

 _Thanks for your patience!_

* * *

The first two months after Rory was born, Emily fretted over her milk supply. There was always enough, but there wasn't a plethora, and she often wondered if Rory was getting everything she needed. I'm not sure what happened after that, but if I had to pinpoint one thing, it was that when Rory started being more expressive in her happiness with Emily and her life, Emily settled down and stopped worrying so much. As Rory's smiles became more frequent, as her body filled out and little dimples graced her knees and elbows, as her hands started grasping Emily's skin more, looking for sustenance, Emily's body let loose with a deluge of milk.

It was at that point that Emily started wearing nursing bras with pads to bed. That kept up for about a month until I told her I didn't mind if she leaked milk, and I didn't mind if we needed to change the sheets every morning - I only wanted her to sleep comfortably.

I was never the type to sleep through one of Rory's feedings even though Emily would often hush a whispered, "Sleep, Derek." I never did. I can't recall a single middle-of-the-night feeding where I slumbered through the whole process. Emily would feed Rory, and I'd watch them. When Rory was done eating, I'd burp and change her if she needed it before putting her back in her bassinet, and later, her crib in her own room.

And then I'd wrap my arms around Emily and rub her back or run my fingers through her hair until her breathing was deep and even again. The whole time I'd think, "How did I even _get_ you and how did we become _this_ happy and wondrous _?"_

Emily never really gave up those night-time feedings, even after Rory was quite fine with a bottle. There was one time when she had the flu that I got to feed Rory in the middle of the night. And then there were five nights in the Bahamas where my mother handled the bedtime bottle.

Rory was ten months old before she reliably slept a solid nine hours at night. Emily would nurse her at around eight o'clock, and then again at around five o'clock in the morning, and that had pretty much been our routine for the past several months. Rory's fourteen months old now and Emily is in no rush to end that bedtime and pre-dawn nursing, something I can understand. We both know this is it; there won't be another baby or another opportunity.

Every night, after I tucked Leon into bed, I'd stop in Rory's doorway and watch Emily rocking and nursing our daughter in the faint moonlight. She'd smile softly at me as I stood there and gazed at them.

And now there's this. There's a fussy, disgruntled Rory in my arms looking for her mother or her grandmother, getting angrier and angrier each time I try to give her a bottle, and missing the comfort of her room and her rocking chair. There's my hard chest where she's used to softness, and an ache in both of us for the missing people in our lives.

"Rory," I whisper. "It's okay. She'll be home soon. They'll both be home soon," I say with confidence that is built more upon hope than reality.

Her teary eyes take in my face and I marvel at how her long eyelashes clump together just like Emily's do when she cries. I put the bottle down, giving up on that. Rory had a good dinner, and the bottle is a perfunctory substitute for the comfort of her mother's arms. She doesn't need it for sustenance, and loathes the plastic nipple that is nothing like her mother at all.

I move her from the cradle of my arms and lay her instead along my thighs, keeping my hands under her back so she's lifted softly upright and staring right into my face. Rory and Leon are keeping me here, and it's for a good reason. They need one of us, at least. But I want to be with Emily now more than I can possibly quantify with words. I want to watch her back. I want to kill the people who did this to us. I want to be the one who gathers my mother in my arms and carries her away from the hell she's currently living in...

Another picture arrived earlier today, similar to the last in that my mother was shackled and handcuffed and naked. But this time, her back was to the camera and the angry welts on her back were so red and raw that I could almost feel her pain, remembering my own brief experience under a whip. The message attached read, "You're doing well, playing by the rules and keeping this out of the paper. Tomorrow we'll contact you with instructions to get her back."

I left Rory and Leon with Chris and Rossi for a moment and then proceeded to fling my body into the backyard of this mansion we're currently hiding in. I threw up in the perfectly trimmed rose bushes off the back porch. _She doesn't fit their victim profile. They won't rape her._ I said this over and over in my head while the fall air and sea breeze settled over me, until I felt reasonably sure I believed it.

When I came back into the house, Leon was sitting in Chris's lap and Rory was toddling around the expansive living room here under Rossi's watchful gaze.

Chris was crying, tears dripping down his wrinkled face, and the deep purple bruise on his forehead seemed to be pulsing in sorrow. Leon had his head resting on his grandfather's shoulder, but he looked up at me when I came in, his eyes sad, but free of tears.

"She saved me," he said softly. "She saved me and she'll save Nana."

There was conviction in his voice, a conviction we were all missing up until that moment, and I managed to smile gratefully at him. I wanted to share in his certainty and in that moment I chose to. There was no reason to believe in anything other than Emily coming back to us with my mother. She was beyond good at this sort of thing, and comparing this situation to Doyle was ridiculous; she went after Doyle cold, with no help, and tried to take on ten armed assassins.

She has help now, and a much smaller group of people she's going after. JJ is with her. Penelope discovered some financial discrepancies that had gone overlooked in Adrian Stancu's files. Namely, he was skimming off the top; not a lot but enough, about fifty thousand dollars a year. And back in 2007, he purchased a young girl at one of his auctions. The records indicated they named her Holly and that she was eight years old at the time. But we never found Holly two years ago, and the money from his purchase never made it into the family's account. The four hundred thousand dollars he'd bought her for up and disappeared, just like Holly. Penelope is working around the clock trying to figure out what he did with that money.

Confident in Emily's abilities and JJ's support and Penelope's skills, I smiled again at Leon and placed a gentle hand on Chris's shoulder. I then picked up Rory and took her out to the backyard to let her run around in the falling leaves for a bit. Leon followed me a few minutes later.

"Will they hurt Nana like they hurt me?" he asked directly.

I placed my hand on his head and pulled him towards me. He'd been through hell and overcome so much and he knew far more about the indecency of some of the human population than he ever let on most days. "No," I replied. "I don't think so. She wasn't what they were after."

He nodded against my waist and squeezed me with his arms before letting me go. "They saved me and Rory. They fought and they gave me time to get away."

"They did," I agreed, grateful and heartbroken at the same time.

"He's sad," Leon said to me while placing his hand in mine.

"Grandpa? I know. He's worried about Mama, but she'll be okay. She'll be back in a few days," I replied to my son as I watched Rory run happily around the yard.

Leon shook his head. "Yes, but he's worried about Nana, too. They're very good friends."

I glanced at Leon. It was true that my mother and Chris had become friendly in the time we'd all spent living on the property, but something in Leon's voice gave me pause. I looked into his eyes and raised an eyebrow.

Leon smiled softly. "I saw them the other night. On Nana's porch. They were looking at each other the way you and Mama do." He squeezed my hand and whispered an innocent, "He kissed her cheek. Grandpa wants Nana back just as much as we all do."

The news stunned me. I'd never seen anything more than friendly conversations between Chris and my mother, not once. But our world had shifted in the past six weeks, with me returning to work full-time and Emily beginning her job at the State Department part-time. No longer were the days when I could work from home while Emily went to her job. My mother and Chris had had countless hours alone together and if I believed Leon, and I did, their relationship had shifted over the course of that time.

Suddenly Chris's nearly constant tears since we picked him up from the hospital made a lot more sense to me, as well as the fact that Chris had stayed in the house with my mother after Leon went to bed a couple of nights ago. It was that single shift in behavior, Chris staying instead of going to his cabin, that likely saved Leon and Rory.

I didn't say anything more about it to Leon. I was torn up inside with sadness that competed with wanting to give Rory and Leon some normalcy and confidence. We played together in the backyard. We ate the food Rossi made us for dinner. Leon, who slept a solid ten hours a night most nights and had gotten maybe five the night before, fell asleep just a little after seven o'clock that evening...

There are six bedrooms on the second story of this house, and we're using none of them. We're on a fold-out couch in the den on the first floor. Chris sleeps on a cot next to us. And Rossi, in constant vigilance that is probably unnecessary, is content to sleep in an arm chair in the corner of the room, his feet propped up on an ottoman and a gun in his hand.

If it wasn't so damn devastating, it would be a lot like camp - me and the kids snuggled together on the fold-out couch, Chris snoozing within arm's reach, and Rossi just a couple of feet away.

With Leon and Chris already asleep, I tried to feed Rory in the living room tonight in hopes that she'd drift off to sleep, too. But she's having none of it.

She stares at me with her damp eyelashes in the soft light from a single lamp. "Mamamamama," she whimpers.

So I reassure her again. "Mama will be back soon."

I stand, aware the Rossi has stationed himself in the hallway, where he can both keep an eye on me and Rory and guard the door to the den. I hold Rory in my arms and feel as her cheek settles down on my chest. "Dada," she sighs, like she's resigned herself to this turmoil much like I have.

I walk around the room and rub her back. I try to sing, but the words stick in my throat. I just want to call Emily, but I know I shouldn't. Our phones are probably safe, but the only connection she should have with us while she's away is with Penelope, if we're to be absolutely sure no one will ever know she's in London.

With tears in my eyes, and not caring that Rossi is in earshot, I talk instead. "On Mama's last birthday, you were only about six weeks old. You were fussy and didn't want to fall asleep that night, so Mama held you and I fed her birthday cake in bed. She smiled at you and me the whole time."

Words become too much for me. I walk and let my tears fall into our daughter's beautiful, curly, wild hair as she snuggles against me and finally lets sleep take her.

Rossi's hand on my shoulder is warm and comforting as I pass him in the hallway. I hear him follow me into the room, and much like the night before, I settle Rory next to Leon in the middle of the bed. I watch Rossi take up residence in the chair in the corner of the room, his gun glinting slightly in the moonlight. Before I crawl into the bed next to Rory, I turn to Chris.

He's sleeping on his side, his body facing the window in the room. I step over and do what I think Emily would do in that moment, bending over his body and kissing his head softly. His voice startles me. "I keep thinking that if I hadn't spent so many years as a drunk, I would have been strong enough to fight him and keep Fran safe, too."

My tears start up again, but I blink them back. "If you hadn't spent so many years drinking, it's more likely you wouldn't have been there at the house at all, and this would have been much worse. You fought hard, Chris. Emily will get her back."

He rolls over to look at me and voices the one question I've been avoiding in my mind this whole time. "But will we get them both back the same?"

I don't have an answer. There's just grief and fear crashing around inside me. I squeeze his shoulder and nod without confidence. I'm holding all the pieces of Emily's current life in this room and she's off completely rogue, having to be someone else right now, and I don't know what the world looks like when we get her back.

* * *

" _What's a woman like you doing in a dive like this?"_

 _The voice startled me. I recognized it, but it didn't make sense in the context of the establishment I was currently sitting in. Clyde Easter, I confirmed as I looked up from my drink. I worked with him briefly, a joint effort between SIS and the FBI my first year out of the academy. Four years had passed since then, and I didn't know why he was standing before me in a bar in Cleveland._

 _I didn't know how to answer his question, so I simply watched him as he sat on the stool next to me, dipping his head intimately close to mine and whispering, "There are nicer bars around here, but you're tired of the meat market they present. The gentlemen at those establishments are either married and trying to hide it or overly-confident, and the game is exhausting for you. You choose a blue collar place, but you come dressed in a designer suit. No one here will hurt you, but no one will approach you either. It's how you like it. You can say that you went out on Friday night when you get back to the office on Monday. You come to places like this because the women find you snobby and the men find you unapproachable and you can drink alone."_

 _I opened my mouth in a rebuff and then sighed. "Nailed it."_

 _Clyde laughed and pulled away from me. "I'm good at things like that. I think you could even be better than me. That's why I'm here. I was hired at Interpol UK to start a new group. Elite profilers. People who are fervently independent and want to dedicate their lives to the job and undercover missions. An equivalent to your Navy Seals, if you will, but without quite as much secrecy. When I was told to pull together a team, I thought of you, and then I thought it was impossible since you needed to be a UK citizen. And then I dug a little bit and found out you had dual citizenship."_

 _I stared at him and sipped my drink. My immediate feeling was to jump at the chance. Wallowing away the rest of my twenties in the Midwest was not exactly what I had in mind when I joined the FBI._

" _Why me?" I asked._

" _Because I saw you in action a few of years ago. You're far too brilliant to be in Ohio. Sexism is keeping you here, if I had my guess. Your superiors are suppressing your skills to the higher ups. It's very rare when I am scared of anything, and you scared the crap out of me on that case four years ago. I thought, 'Here's a woman who could both read my mind and rip off my balls in a second. What the hell is she doing in Ohio?'"_

 _I smiled. I'd been feeling the same way for awhile now and it was depressing. Still, London. I didn't know if wanted that._

" _What would the cases be like?" I asked Clyde._

" _I've currently only got a small team, me and a man named Sean. I want you to join us. We've been tasked with going undercover to locate an arms dealer right now. Do you know how to play poker?"_

 _I surveyed the man before me and took another sip of my drink. "You're saying sexism is holding me in a field office in Ohio, but how is it any less sexist of you to use my gender to go undercover?"_

 _Clyde didn't blink. "Oh, it's sexist as hell. But at least it's honest. If you work for me and do a good job, I won't hold you back from transfers or promotions if you want them. I'll make sure you get where you want to be if you work for me and do a good job. I promise you that."_

 _I didn't know why, but I believed him completely. He was confusing and not always appropriate, from what I knew of him, but I never doubted his honesty._

" _I'm fairly good at poker," I told him._

" _I'll make you better," he said._

Why I'm laying in a bed in Nick Hansen's guestroom thinking about that time with Clyde is not lost on me: It's where it all started. Had Clyde never came back for me, I wouldn't know Nick Hansen, and I probably would never know Derek Morgan. We came up from the FBI academy separated by several years. I was at the Academy while he was still pursuing his JD. There's as slight chance we would have ended up at the Hoover Building together at some point, but it's doubtful.

Everything needed to happen how it did in order for me to be where I am now. And where I am now is far different than where I was forty-eight hours ago. Forty-eight hours ago, I was sleeping next to Derek in bed looking forward to my birthday dinner out, his arm locked around my middle and his breath warm against the back of my neck while our children slept just down the hall. Tonight, I'm in Nick Hansen's flat, on one of the two twin beds in a guest room that had been preserved for his relatives when they came to visit.

Nick had cleaned up while we were out seeing Gil. He'd cleaned up his flat and he'd cleaned himself up. His guest room was now impeccable, but the two twin beds were fitted with sheets decorated with space rockets because his two most frequent visitors were his nephews.

I never planned on this.

I considered staying with Nick while I was in London, but I never considered JJ sharing the room with me. I never considered the close proximity of another person who would witness my weaknesses when I was trying to be resolute, and I never considered the sound of a baby crying on the floor above us. An infant by the sound of it.

JJ's breath was deep and even a few feet away from me in the room, and my breathing was ragged and wandering all over my mental map.

Gill was everything we needed and more than I was prepared to handle. Gil was the owner of all of Clyde's personal medals and commendations from his past that I'd wondered about. Gil was with Clyde in the Royal Marines and later SIS. He was the behind-the-scenes man who orchestrated everything from supplies to electronic surveillance while Clyde took in all the public accolades. And when Clyde found out he was dying, Gill was the recipient of every aware Clyde ever received while Gil was in his ear. Clyde left Gil with a note, "These were always more yours than mine."

 _You're twenty minutes from Theydon Garnon. Why didn't Clyde call you immediately two years ago?_ I'd asked the grown hippie who'd shown us around his house and let me see all of Clyde's awards.

 _I was in Russia at the time,_ Gil had responded.

I nodded. There was no point in arguing that statement. Clyde's whole purpose in those last weeks of his life was to get me and Derek together, and if Gil had been close enough to stop the fire, Clyde would have called him.

Gil was generous, with both thoughts and information and supplies. "Whatever you need," he'd told me and JJ.

I didn't know exactly what we needed at that point, but I had a list of thoughts - night-vision binoculars, weapons, vests, access to a helicopter and plane, sedatives and amobarbital or any "truth serum" he could get his hands on.

It was that item on the list that caused him to look closely at me.

"I need to know if there's anyone else out there besides the people who have Fran," I told him.

He was quick just like Clyde, voicing what I'd already thought about. "Odds are that there is is. You say the woman with the red hair is in her twenties? Where does she come up with something like this? From Adrian? The idea, maybe, but there's got to be someone else she has access to that's feeding all of this. You want to find the woman, you find out why Adrian kept her in secret. You want to find the person orchestrating this, then you're going to have to dig deeper. Adrian won't tell you even if you could secretly visit him. But it's just not possible. Not in all my years. An amateur, no matter how much vengeance she has in her heart, is not capable of this. There's someone else."

I took in those words and agreed with them on some level, but I didn't obsess over them. Fran was my only mission at the moment. Fran and a new picture that had been sent early that morning, on US time, which had arrived to us in the afternoon on UK time while we were first getting to know Gil.

Gil assured us he'd get our supplies together. He said he knew everything about me, and about how much Clyde cared about me, and it was more than just duty, it was like helping out family.

"What if you're caught helping us?" I'd asked him.

Without blinking or looking away from my eyes, he'd said, "I'd willingly die before I gave you away."

Regardless of his eccentric appearance, I believed him. JJ believed him. And with those words ringing in our ears, we'd made our way back to Nick's flat and started delving into his research.

Adrian was a sociopath uncomplicated by a dicey childhood, which was the first red flag to me. No one goes from innocent child to full-bread sociopath in the blink of an eye. There are always clues, but Adrian's history yielded none. He was a good student, he was well-liked, he was popular and admired and sheltered by his wealthy parents. There were no mysteries in his hometown in Romania when he was growing up. Adrian Stancu was the perfect child, even though we all knew it wasn't true.

As evening turned to night, JJ and I were both feeling our lack of sleep in the past forty-eight hours. We agreed with Nick to six hours, and we'd resume at five-thirty in the morning. We readied for bed. I crawled in between the sheets of a twin bed covered in spaceships and stars just moments before JJ did.

"Em?" she asked.

"Hmm," I murmured in my exhausted state.

"Nothing," she said.

I couldn't find sleep, even long after JJ's breath settled in the deep, even rhythm of slumber. And then the baby started up, a baby who I could hear through the vents in Nick's building.

I'd thought my breastmilk would just fade into oblivion while I was gone. Quite frankly, I was counting on it, to just let that go and focus on finding Fran and ending this situation permanently. But with the muffled cries of a baby in the building, I felt a tingle in my breasts that I hadn't really felt in a long time.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," my harsh side murmured in irritation as I dragged myself out of bed. I made my way to the bathroom and lifted my pajama top - an old t-shirt of Derek's that I'd pilfered from Rossi's house before my flight. It was over the sink in Nick's bathroom that I hand-expressed the milk that was causing the heaviness in my breasts.

My tears and my breast milk mingled together and slid down the drain.

I'm not sure how long I was in the bathroom before both my milk and tears subsided. All I knew was that I needed sleep. The night Fran was taken, I hadn't slept at all. And last night I'd only had a few hours on the plane. My eyes were red and weary, and my body was exhausted, but I couldn't imagine laying down in bed at that moment.

So I went to Nick's living room and flicked on a small table lamp. There were file folders all over the coffee table and I picked one up. I also picked up Nick's pack of cigarettes and snatched one from the cardboard case. I lit it with a lighter that was on the table and inhaled deeply before coughing slightly.

I pondered the mystery of Adrian Stancu's past.

No sociopath goes from zero to sixty. I had the feeling that the mystery of the red-headed woman lied in Adrian's past - a past that we couldn't find.

I flipped through documents, learning more about Adrian's childhood. He lived in Romania and went to a private school where he had an impeccable academic and behavioral record. His family vacationed every summer, spending time in both the shores around Greece and Provence.

I'm deep in thought when JJ wanders down the hall. Dressed in flannel pajama pants and a gray t-shirt, she looks much younger than she is. "Why aren't you sleeping?" she asks.

She doesn't ask why I was smoking.

"We're missing something," I say.

I pull Nick's laptop towards me and open the internet browser. I start doing searches for missing children's cases in both Provence and Greece that were unsolved. I click on links and search results and go back and clicked on different links.

"Did you smoke before the BAU?" JJ asks.

I shake my head. "Not really. Only on cases. I'm one of those fortunate people who don't get addicted to nicotine. I like the rush it gives me, but I don't need it or crave it."

I see JJ nod out of the corner of my eye. "Why did you join Interpol in the first place?" she asks.

"Clyde needed a good poker player," I respond as I stab at the links on my web search.

JJ huffs out an audible breath. "At your wedding you said that you'd lived all over the world and had only ever felt like you were home once in your life, and that was at your house with Derek. That's why I'm here. I don't want you to give up on your home, no matter what happens."

My eyes are torn between what I've found on the computer screen and what JJ is saying. Her eyes are luminous in the soft glow of the room, heartfelt and staring at me. I don't want to give up on that either, but we have to get through this before we can go back.

I turn the laptop screen to face her. "Tatiana Gavlan, eleven years old, went missing from Provence in 1980. Her family was renting a house for the summer in the same neighborhood Adrian's family always stayed. He would have been thirteen at the the time. He was never questioned in her disappearance, but his father was, though they never found anything. It was the last summer his family spent any time in Provence."

I watch JJ take in Tatiana's face - the startling blue eyes and the red curly hair. I watch as JJ reaches for her burn phone. It's two o'clock in the morning in London, but it's not obscenely late in DC yet, and we aren't working on any modernized synchronicity with time anyway.

"Garcia," I hear JJ say into the phone. "Look for home purchases or rentals from the time Adrian's four-hundred thousand dollars disappeared until two years. We're looking for anything in Europe where the first name on the deed or agreement is Tatiana. Or the last name is Gavlan."

Maybe it's a needle in a haystack, but I don't think so. The resemblance between Tatiana and the woman I saw on surveillance cameras in that courthouse in London is uncanny. They aren't the same people for sure, but if I close my eyes, I can almost delve into Adrian's head. He was thirteen and his games went too far with a little girl in the neighborhood on summer. He killed her accidentally - and hid the body. And his life and his cult was spent in search of a suitable replacement. I think back to the number of red-haired children I saw who were his victims - an overwhelming percentage.

And Adrian found one. He found one and he kept her, and now she's out for revenge. And I'm out to take her down.

I take a drag from the cigarette in my hands and open my eyes to look at JJ, who is staring at me like she doesn't quite know what to make of me. After nearly an hour of silence, the baby a floor above us starts up with her crying again. My nipples tingle, but I push the feeling aside. I stab out my cigarette.

"We should get a little sleep," I say to the woman I consider my best friend.

She nods. She touches my shoulder, but stays quiet when I pull away from her.


	8. Chapter 8

_Sometime in the past few hours of sleep, the clear night sky had given way to fat raindrops that splattered comfortingly against the floor of the balcony off our bedroom. It was the sound of those drops falling that woke me up. I blinked open my eyes and noticed Emily wasn't beside me in bed. I reached my hand out and found her side of the bed still warm._

 _I glanced at the bedside clock and saw it was a little after two o'clock in the morning. The last time I remembered looking at the clock, it was a little after ten and Emily was sprawled out half on top of me, her sweaty body pressed against my skin, her breath warm against my neck. I must have drifted off then._

 _I stretched and felt the ache in my muscles. Smiling, I sat up in bed and tried to remember the general direction my underwear had been flung hours before. I gave up on that quickly and just grabbed a new pair from the dresser drawer._

 _From the crack in the bedroom door, I could see light filtering up from the first floor of the rowhouse. I quietly made my way downstairs, wondering what Emily was up to. I found her standing in front of the window in the living room, staring out at the rainy street, the green space beyond that and the Potomac. There was one light on in the kitchen that gave enough of an illumination so that I could see her. She appeared to be wearing the dress shirt I'd been wearing the day before, the one I'd worn to work in the morning and worn to the doctor's office when we took our HIV tests._

 _I gazed at her back for a few seconds and was about to approach her when she raised her arms above her head and stretched. The first thing I noticed was that aside from my shirt, she appeared to be wearing nothing else; the hem of the shirt raised enough that I could see she hadn't bothered with underwear at least. The second thing I noticed was what was clutched in her right hand._

" _That's mine," I said with a smirk._

 _She spun around, her eyes wide, a spoon in her mouth. Once she got over the shock of me surprising her, she removed the spoon from her lips and returned my smirk. Her hair was a rumpled mess and the street light illuminated her figure as she stood there, only one button around mid-chest fastened, my Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey in her hand._

 _I stepped towards her and wagged my finger. "When we were at the store on Sunday, I went for that and you chose some non-fat frozen yogurt thing that shouldn't even be on the same shelves as real ice cream."_

 _She dipped the spoon in the container and took another bite. "Sex makes me hungry," she said with a raspy voice after swallowing. "Besides, I think I more than worked off the calories to allow me a little indulgence."_

 _I stopped right in front of her. "So you're leaving me with that criminal case of ice cream substitute?"_

 _She dug out another spoonful of ice cream and winked at me. "We can share," she whispered as she held the spoon out to me._

 _I took the spoon from her hand and turned it around, feeding her the ice cream. Then I chased after it with my lips and tongue. She moaned in my mouth as I went after my treat. When her mouth was clear of the sweet taste of ice cream, and there was only Essence of Emily left, I pulled away from her. With heavily-lidded eyes she took the spoon from me and fed me a bite of ice cream, then proceeded to press her lips against mine and return the favor of taking her bite of ice cream from my mouth._

 _I lifted her then, and carried her the few steps to the arm chair in the living room, sitting down and dragging her body over mine. My thigh muscles protested in a good way and warmth settled over me as I listened to her carefree laugh. She settled across my lap easily, her knees on either side of my hips, her forehead resting against mine, the ice cream still clutched possessively in her hand._

" _We have to be up for work in less than four hours," she murmured, and her sweet breath washed across my face._

" _Five," I responded. "I think we've worked out enough in the past twelve hours to forego running in the morning."_

 _She tilted her head back and fed me a bite of ice cream. "Five, then." Contemplating my face in the soft glow of light, she smiled again. "I love you. I love how easy it is to be in love with you. I love how safe my heart feels with you."_

 _I clutched her to me then, pulling her chest against mine, her arms holding spoon in one hand and ice cream in the other coming around my neck._

" _The butterfly effect," she breathed across my cheek. "I keep trying to find the seemingly innocuous thing in our pasts that irrevocably changed our future to bring us to this point. It's strange to think that if I hadn't crossed paths with Clyde on a random case in Ohio when I was twenty-four years old, I likely would have never even met you."_

 _That thought gave me pause. "If your father had never left, if my father hadn't been murdered, we wouldn't be here either. I have a hard time with Chaos Theory. I think it's just the way life goes. But I think you and I would have found each other somehow, no matter what."_

 _She sat back on my legs then and contemplated me as she took a bite of ice cream. "You're turning me soft, making me believe in things like soul mates."_

 _I watched her lick the sugary taste off her lips and followed my tongue with hers, completing the task for her, clutching her hips as she moaned._

" _Do you believe?" I asked._

 _She fed me a bite of ice cream and blinked slowly at me. "I believe that people with simpler pasts probably have their pick of potential partners who could complete them. I believe that for people like us, happiness probably comes in the form of hiding a lot of ourselves inside instead of sharing it with someone else. Unless you find that one person, the who can reach inside and pull everything out, all the good and the bad, and love and understand the whole picture."_

" _And that's who I am to you?" I asked, my eyes burning slightly with the sting of tears I wouldn't let escape._

" _That's who we are for each other," she whispered without hesitation while placing the ice cream container and spoon on the side table text to the chair. My eyes tracked her hands as she flicked open the single button holding my dress shirt on her body and skimmed it off her shoulders, letting it flutter to the floor at my feet…_

"Derek," the voice says.

I startle from my memories at the voice that sounds like it's said my name several times. "Sorry," I respond.

Andrew Farley smiles at me sympathetically. He glances at the four containers of ice cream on the table. "So it's okay, then? For a treat for Leon this afternoon? I bought a few kinds because I didn't know what he liked."

I can't believe in this moment that I'm sitting in the kitchen of a mansion in Delaware having a conversation with Andrew Farley, the groundskeeper of this place and Chris's best friend from childhood, about ice cream.

My mother is missing, and Emily and JJ are hot on her trail at this moment. Penelope had found a few possibilities in terms of homes and rentals with the names Tatiana or Gavlan associated with them, but there was one that seemed the most likely: An old farm house that hugged the border between England and Scotland and was purchased by one Tatiana Craig eight years ago, approximately two months after four-hundred-thousand dollars had gone missing from Adrian Stancu's "family" bank account.

Three hours ago, a little after dawn in Delaware and late morning in London, Penelope found the house. Emily and JJ along with a man named Gil were off and running, trying to come up with a plan that none of us were privy to.

Two hours ago, a new picture of my mother arrived, this time of her naked and strapped to a table, fresh welts across her abdomen, and the message: _Three million dollars. You have twenty-four hours to make the money available to move to an overseas account. Further instructions to follow._

Three million dollars. I didn't think the figure was random, which meant that the people behind this had more than just visual surveillance of us. In the past year we had granted college scholarships to four teenagers who were victims of sexual crimes, and three million dollars of Clyde Easter's money was approximately what we had left. It was spread far and wide in various investment accounts, and though I could have gathered it together and moved it around to make it available, I didn't bother. We were all in agreement on this point: Paying or not paying would not bring my mother back alive. Emily had to find her; that was my mother's only chance.

One hour ago, Andrew had left this property in Delaware to go to the store to buy some necessary supplies, like diapers for Rory. And, apparently, he'd raided the ice cream aisle as well.

Ten minutes ago, he arrived back at the house with bags. Rossi was dozing on a chair in the living room while Leon and Chris half-heartedly tried to play a game of chess near him. Rory was in my lap, munching on cereal and fruit.

My finger reaches out to trace the frost on the container of Chunky Monkey ice cream in front of me. "A treat is fine," I finally respond.

There was a level of sophistication with this case from the technology standpoint that didn't quite add up. The woman with the red, curly hair looked to be in her twenties. The man who helped Robert and Peter Daniels take me two years ago was also in his twenties. We deduced that they'd likely been children at some point who were kidnapped by Adrian's family. It was doubtful that any part of their childhoods had been spent becoming familiar with computers and hacking. And then there was Patrick Joyce, a man who had been in prison for the past twelve years. So who exactly had taught these people how to electronically send pictures that Penelope had no ability to track?

There has to be someone else helping them.

I am overtaken by the need to call Emily, to tell her to do this differently, to get my mother, but let law enforcement take it from there. I'm scared that they're going to be blindsided by more people than we're anticipating when they finally locate my mother.

I'd already reached inside Emily and found all the broken pieces, and we'd put them back together. She'd done the same for me.

The idea of another broken piece, like my mother being murdered. Or the piece that comes from Emily murdering the people who did this to our family, makes my heart seize up. I'm not sure how we recover from something like that. But I can't call her. Both she and JJ are radio silent for us right now, for their own protection as well as ours.

It's not until I feel Andrew try to remove it from the table that I realize I'm clutching that small container of Ben and Jerry's ice cream in a death grip.

* * *

 _The water was so hot, it was nearly scalding me. I wished I could make it hotter as I used ample soap and the washcloth to scrub the night's activities from my skin. I'd gotten into the private club with an invitation to meet up with Patrick again the next night. It was an accomplishment I should be proud of, and the desire to find the people who were taking, selling and raping children like Sam O'Brien was overwhelming._

 _Still, giving my body away to a group of people in a sex club repulsed me. My stomach lurched in the hotel shower and I threw up bile over the drain. I pressed my face into the hot spray after and let the pinpricks of water burn my skin._

 _I shut off the shower and dried enough to throw on my robe. I just wanted to sleep. To sleep and forget and get myself ready for round two._

 _I emerged from the steamy bathroom to find Clyde sitting on my bed. "Change of plans," he said, almost apologetically._

" _What do you mean?" I asked._

 _Clyde held up the box of hair dye, dye that would take my currently white-blonde head to very light brown with frosted highlights. "Tsia got into the weapon's group. Interpol is ready to send someone in with Doyle, and you're it."_

 _Real fear settled in me, far more fear than what I felt about the idea of screwing random men in a sex club. This was a long-term assignment, and I'd heard enough about Ian Doyle to know that extraction or death were my only two options once I went in._

" _I just got into the private club tonight. I'm close. I can feel it. Why are you pulling me?"_

" _It's not my call. Interpol wants Ian Doyle more, and you're the best person to go in."_

 _There was something off with his voice, something that made me think he wasn't being completely honest with me. "What aren't you telling me?" I asked._

 _He stood from the bed and stepped towards me. His hand rose and he gently fingered my blond, wet hair. "Nothing. I just wanted you to get a break, but there's no time. I don't like pulling you from this case and giving up on getting these people, and I don't like you having to switch identities so quickly. I've got forty-eight hours to prep you, and then we're sending you to Boston, where you are to dazzle Doyle and get inside enough for him to bring you back to Europe with him. Lauren Reynolds. That's your name now. Time to let Katarina go, Emily."_

 _I stared into his eyes. He seemed genuine. I nodded slightly. "Let me get dressed and we can get out of this hotel."_

Gil's castle-like house has a safe room, which isn't surprising. That there is another door within that safe room that leads to a large, windowless supply room isn't really surprising either. The massive amount of supplies he has there did surprise me, though. He could wage a war against a small city and have supplies left over when all was said and done.

"What sort of people do you typically help?" I asked him cautiously this morning while I surveyed the space. A numbness had settled over me during the few hours I slept the night before; it was a feeling I was familiar with from my past. We had a direction to go, an address, and a plan in motion. There was no space in me for panic, fear or sadness; there was only a goal.

Gil smiled at me; he didn't seem to be put off by any question I threw his way, and didn't seem to mind me in his secret rooms. "I have a very small list of clients, people like Clyde. Most of the other people on your list will supply anyone with anything for the right price. I don't do it for the money because I don't need the money, so I can afford to be discriminating in my client list. I help people I trust to be doing the right things with the supplies I give them."

I fingered the guns on a display case. "Clyde came here. When we were in Theydon Garnon and I said we needed weapons and other supplies, I was surprised with how quickly he was able to get everything we needed without tapping out our money completely."

Gil nodded while he stood at a table and surveyed a selection of what looked like drones. "Clyde was the only other person who knew the codes to get in here. He called me to let me know he was taking supplies."

I closed my eyes briefly and sighed. Clyde. He was everywhere around me it seemed, and I missed him to the point that I ached. I thought I knew him best, but he lived his life with secrets. Gil was obviously one of his biggest secrets - a man who could and would get Clyde anything he needed without question. And now that loyalty had transferred to me.

I opened my eyes and fingered what looked like a typical sport's watch. "What's this?"

"GPS unit," Gil said without looking up from the table as he fitted what looked like a camera on a drone. "And a recording device, microphone and camera." He stopped what he was doing and walked towards me, picking up the watch. I stood quietly while he fastened it on my wrist. I half listened as he pointed out the mechanics of the watch. "I can find you anywhere in the world with this on," he said. "You keep it."

"Did you make this?" I asked.

Gil nodded and went back to the drone he was working on. "I have plenty of hours alone here."

I surveyed the room quietly while he worked. "Do you have the ability to make fake passports?"

Gil smiled slightly. "It's already done, Emily. Last night. For you and your family. I like to be prepared and look at all possible ends to an operation. If this goes south, which I'll do my damnedest to make sure doesn't happen, you'll need to disappear."

He nodded with his chin towards a backpack on the table across the room. Inside I found passports with fake names for me, Derek, Rory, Leon, my father and Fran. And what looked to be about fifty thousand dollars in cash.

I had to shut my eyes against the fake names and faces on those passport photos to keep my feelings in check. I felt like I'd been away from them for months when it had only been a couple of days. That life and my home seemed like a distant memory. "Where did you get the pictures?"

"Your cloud-based storage," he replied easily.

I stared at the back of his head. "We won't be using that anymore," I said as I put the passports back in the backpack.

"That's probably wise," Gil replied simply.

"Why are you doing this for me?" I asked him. I'd asked him several times, and his answer was always the same, simple, _Because you called._

But he turned then to look at me then and gave me the real answer. "Clyde made me swear that if you ever needed help, I would help you. He told me he felt like he'd ruined your life because of a decision he made back in 2004."

Gil paused, the inner struggle evident in his voice at sharing a secret of Clyde's with me. I raised my eyebrows at him. Gil turned away from me again, but kept speaking. "It was Clyde's decision to pull you from the case in 2004 and send you in after Doyle instead. He hated the idea that you were involved in a case where sex with so many people was your only way in. He said he couldn't stand the thought. He decided to pull you and send you after Doyle instead, because he thought it was the lesser of two evils. Turned out, he was wrong. He said he'd never forgiven himself for Doyle. He told me you were like family to him in a way that no one had ever felt like family, stronger than blood. And then he made me promise that if anything happened to him, that I would be there for you. It was an easy promise to make."

I blinked back tears, trying to absorb what he'd just told me. I couldn't believe Clyde never told me, and I reasoned shame had a lot to do with it. Clyde didn't do shame or mistakes well. Still, if Clyde hadn't made that decision, there likely would never have been the BAU, never Derek, never Leon and never Rory. I probably would have never found my father.

"You knew all about me, but he never mentioned you to me," I said softly to Gil.

He had no response to that except for a small nod. "Two weeks after I made that promise, right before I left for Russia, Clyde came to me with all of his medals and awards. He told me he was dying and that he'd be giving my number to you when the time came."

I had a list of questions a mile long in my head, but didn't get a chance to ask them. My burn phone rang and I saw it was JJ. She told me she and Nick had procured the helicopter we needed.

"We need to go so we can get in position before it gets dark," I told Gil.

He nodded and picked up the drone and an iPad. He grabbed one of the duffel bags on the ground by the door and I grabbed the other. There was no adrenaline rush in me, not like when I went after Doyle; Doyle had been pure rage and vengeance and this was more like simple resolve, like an instruction manual in my head, a manual that told me how to get my life back.

 _Find all the people responsible, kill them, get Fran, set the trap for the scapegoat, go home, resume life._

Two hours later, still strangely calm with that mantra running through my head, I look through the binoculars at a two story house in the countryside. It's quite possible that my body is in Scotland right now, but the house sits firmly on the England side of the border. There's smoke coming from the chimney on this foggy, cold fall day. The Kevlar vest I'm wearing feels far heavier on my frame than I remember it feeling in the past.

Gil is clutching the iPad in his hand, controlling the drone that he sent flying in the air. I glance at the screen and see five red dots appear on the screen, images created by the heat sensors on the drone.

"Five bodies," Gil says.

"And not one of them is Fran's," I say disappointedly.

Gil glances at me. "They look like they're sitting around a room or a table. No one is moving. Fran wouldn't just be there hanging out with them," I explain.

"Maybe this isn't the house," Gil says.

But it is; I can feel it. Garcia had found enough information to make me believe we were in exactly the right place. Adrian had his own private plane, and he'd followed the rules for the most part in using it, filing a flight plan, and making far too many flights between Italy and the small airstrip in Scotland that was about fifteen miles from this house in the past eight years. Many of those flights had stops in Ireland first, which was perplexing. As far as we knew, no one in the family permanently lived in Ireland and they owned no property there. It lead us all to believe that if the people who took Fran had help, the likely place to start looking for that person or people was Ireland.

"I'm going to drop the mics by the doors," Gil says.

The little devices are small, so small I can't see them as they drop from the drone. Small, but strong enough that if someone comes out on the front or back porch and talks, we should be able to hear them. Gil then glides the drone back towards us as we hear the faint sound of helicopter blades. "Let's see if we can draw someone we recognize out from the house," Gil murmurs.

With my binoculars, I can make out Nick and JJ in the front of the helicopter as it crests the treeline behind the house. JJ's hair is now dyed brown and pulled back in a ponytail, and the sunglasses she's wearing are covering the brown contact lenses on her eyes. If they had my family under surveillance, they'd probably seen JJ countless times at our house.

The helicopter turns and circles the property, flying low, lurching and twisting, making it look like there are mechanical issues. _UK AERIAL TOURS_ stands out in blue against both sides of the helicopter.

The front door opens and Patrick Joyce steps out of the house, looking into the air. I suck in deep breath. We're at the right place.

"It looks like it's having mechanical issues," I hear Patrick say into my earpiece as I watch him talk into the open doorway. The last time I'd heard that voice was in 2004, and it was telling me I was the best fuck he'd had in a long time. A little adrenaline surges inside me, a little rage towards these people instead of just numb resolve.

A woman emerges. A woman with red curly hair. A young, blond teenager is standing beside her holding a toddler with red curly hair. I suck in another breath. "Fuck," I murmur. When I'd imagined this, I never considered a small child in the picture.

Gil touches my hand. "We can't back down now. That's four. The fifth is probably the other man. I can just see his shadow behind the woman in the doorway. Fran must be on the property somewhere, but not in the main house."

I close my eyes and my heart jolts, refocusing me on my mission. This is Fran Morgan, and I want her back.

"Set it down hard, Nick," I say into my speaker.

I watch the helicopter as it soars nearly straight up in the air about three hundred feet. Then I hear and watch as the motor turns off and starts again, turns off and starts, stutters and stops and drifts towards the ground. About fifty yards above the side field on the property, it shuts off completely. I watch as it hits the ground hard.

Patrick is the first to move, running towards the helicopter.

"What are you doing?" the red-haired woman shrieks.

"They could be hurt, Marietta!" Patrick shouts back. "If we don't help them and let them call in, the tour company will send people looking."

"Fuck," Marietta yells. Then she's running after Patrick. "Embry, stay with Holly and Adrian," she shouts.

 _Adrian._ The baby's name is Adrian. My stomach rolls as I stand. I grab a black backpack and sling a machine gun over my shoulder. Gil stands with me in unison and gathers his supplies. We run towards the house from the opposite direction of the helicopter.

I glance to my side and think about how many times I ran into a situation similar to this with Clyde or Derek or any member of the BAU, situations where I never felt too much fear because I knew we'd have each other's backs.

Gil fills me with the same sense of confidence.

Embry is the other man's name. Embry, a teenager and a toddler. We'll have them subdued before Patrick and Marietta return to the house, hopefully with JJ and Nick.

And somewhere on this property is Fran Morgan. I can feel it.


	9. Chapter 9

_My single form of peaceful entertainment in this house with Marietta and Embry has come in the form of watching planes. We're about ten miles away as the crow flies from a small air strip where Marietta's plane now sits. A few times a day, other planes glide across the sky. I watch them and daydream that I'm on them, flying somewhere, anywhere away from here. I've even acknowledged the fact that I'd prefer to be dead or have a plane take me straight back to prison rather than be here._

 _I watch them from my vantage point in the upstairs guest room in this house; I'm allowed to be in the guest room during the day provided Marietta or Embry is upstairs with me, but never at night. At night, I'm locked down in the basement because Marietta doesn't quite trust me yet._

 _She shouldn't._

 _She shouldn't because I've been the one to put a stop to Fran's abuse before it got to be too much. When Marietta ordered Embry to rape Fran yesterday morning, I was the one who stepped in front of both Embry and Marietta. "She's old," I said calmly. "We need her alive until the money is transferred, because you know they're going to want to talk to her before any money comes our way. I've been watching her after a beating, and I think her heart is weak. I'm concerned if we push her too much, she'll die before the Morgans can transfer the money, and we won't get it at all."_

 _At that, Marietta screeched, grabbed a whip and lashed it across Fran's stomach a few times._

" _My son and daughter are going to kill you!" Fran screamed defiantly._

" _You mean your daughter-in-law," spit Marietta with another lash of a whip._

" _I mean my daughter," Fran replied, her moan of pain belied by her anger. "She's been mine for two years now, and I love her like my own. She'll never stop until she finds you."_

 _Marietta screeched again and then she laughed maniacally. She's quite unbalanced, the depths of her psychosis becoming more pronounced each hour I'm with her. She turned the whip on me and struck out several times. Then she ordered Embry to zip up and ordered me to take a picture of Fran._

 _Fran wasn't raped. I consider it a barely visible good in the abyss of horrible things I've done in my life._

 _Fran got under my skin the second she stopped crying and found a balance between fighting and calmly accepting her fate. It was her resigned, strong eyes that reminded me so much of my own mother. My mother was a kind woman who worked way too hard to provide for me. She died my first year at Oxford; she never had to know me as the monster I eventually became, something I've been grateful for several times in the past couple of decades._

 _Fran sees right through me, and she doesn't seem afraid to talk to me when no one else is around. She makes me remember the type of man I always thought I'd grow up to be whenever she catches my eye. When I was eighteen and set off for college, I imagined getting my degree and coming back home, getting a good job, and taking care of my mother like she'd always taken care of me. Instead, my mother died and I turned to Adrian Stancu for comfort and became someone I never thought I could be._

 _There's irony here, a mirthless irony: I never could get out of Adrian's trap. It took someone like Marietta breaking me out of prison to allow me to find the man inside me I always wanted to be._

 _Fran looks at me gratefully when I put salve or a cool cloth on her lash marks. Her eyes track mine when I sneak her extra food. She seems appreciative when I turn my back and give her privacy when she uses the bathroom._

" _I'm going to die," she said last night while she was using the basement toilet. It wasn't a question, it was a statement._

 _I didn't know how to answer her. Yes, she was surely going to die. Marietta's already planned for it - as soon as the money is in our possession, we'll give out this address. And then we'll blow the whole place up, Fran included, and disappear._

" _It's okay," Fran whispered. "You don't have to tell me. I'll see my husband again. He's close to me; I can feel him." She lifted her wrists to me so I could put her handcuffs back on._

" _You're not afraid," I said softly._

" _I have nothing to be afraid of when it comes to death. Do you?" she replied just as quietly._

 _Yes, I thought. Plenty. If there's a heaven and hell, I know where I'm going. I'm terrified of dying. I'm terrified about what comes next for me. It doesn't matter that I don't want to be here now, or that I want to find a way to set the kind, old woman free. There's nothing I can do to negate my past deeds. Nothing._

 _I searched Fran's face, but before I could speak, we heard footsteps on the stairs. I quickly got Fran back to her room and strapped to the table._

 _My only freedom in this house at night comes in being locked in the basement and a choice of two rooms - Holly's or Fran's. The room with the computer equipment and weapons is locked up tight._

 _I've been staying with Holly mostly. She's a quiet, broken girl, and she hardly says a word to me. The first time I laid down on the bed beside her, she shifted slightly so she could lift her nightgown, and then rolled over, offering herself to me. I pulled her nightgown back down and covered her with the blanket. "Sleep," I said to her before turning on my side so my back faced her. I'm not certain, but I think she started crying then._

 _Last night, I felt the need to be around Fran. Her time with us was going to start being measured in hours instead of days very soon. Plus, the temperature had dropped a good twenty degrees outside, and it had dropped at least fifteen in the basement. So last night, after Holly was asleep, I grabbed a blanket from her room and went to Fran's room where she was strapped on a table, her naked body shivering and her lips tinged with blue. I tucked the blanket around her, and when she still shivered, I started rubbing her arms, trying to warm her. "I'm sorry," I whispered to her._

" _Then do something about it," she said through chattering lips._

 _Do something? What could I possibly do? We're locked in a basement at night and during the day, Marietta is never far from me. I have no access to the phone, and either Embry or Marietta watches me while I'm on the computer. The second I make a move to end this situation I didn't want to be a part of , Marietta would blow off my leg and I'd bleed out._

 _But I thought about options most of the night while I watched Fran sleep. I thought about them this morning when Marietta came downstairs and really went after Fran with the whip._

 _I thought about them when I sent the picture of Fran off to some strange email address that was supposed to inhibit anyone from tracking the image of Fran with welts and the instructions about three million dollars. I'm not sure where the initial emails go, but it's obvious someone else is helping Marietta._

 _I thought about options this morning while I drank coffee and watched a couple of small planes fly through the air behind the house._

 _I was still thinking about any potential way out of this situation late this afternoon when we were all sitting around the kitchen table discussing where we would first go when the money was in our possession. Embry bought Marietta's wistful yammering about someplace warm and tropical hook, line and sinker. But I saw and heard the deceit. There was something huge she wasn't telling me or Embry._

" _Wouldn't you like to go someplace warm?" she said in a sickeningly sweet voice to her son. "Someplace warm where our family could completely start over."_

" _Father Christmas?" Adrian asked with his garbled lisp. The kid has been obsessed with Christmas stories and books since I got here, despite the fact that it's only October._

" _He'll find us wherever we are," Marietta said. Her eyes glanced up and held my gaze. "We could be having auctions in a couple of years, don't you think? Small ones to start. And little Adrian could carry on his father's legacy eventually."_

 _Fuck. Bloody hell._

 _Embry grinned in anticipation, and I grasped for words that might make Marietta trust me when I was distracted by the sound of helicopter blades filtering into the house, but it all sounded wrong. Marietta stood with a panicked look on her face, but I shook my head and tried to calm her. "Let me look," I said._

 _Secretly, I was hoping the cavalry had arrived; at that point, I'd be fine with Fran Morgan safe and me back in prison. But it wasn't the cavalry. It was a white helicopter with UK AERIAL TOURS plastered brightly in blue on the sides, and the bird was obviously in trouble._

 _I watched it struggle while Marietta joined me on the porch, and then I watched it touch down hard against the ground when the engine gave up. Instinct took over, to help the people on board the helicopter, while selfishly trying to figure out if there was a way I could make this work to my advantage and get Fran - and maybe myself - out of here..._

 _I realize how very little I've run and how out of shape I am about halfway across the field, but I'm still outrunning Marietta easily._

 _I'm outrunning her enough that I'm the only one who sees the shadow of the woman in the passenger seat of the helicopter move her arms towards the pilot._

 _I'm outrunning her enough that I get there just as the passenger is dragging the pilot out of the helicopter and saying loudly, "He's not breathing!" The man has a nasty looking gash on his forehead._

 _Marietta arrives breathless and watches the passenger as she attempts CPR. Marietta doesn't recognize it; at least her face gives nothing away, but I notice it. The slight breaths the pilot is trying not to show._

 _My heart soars. Maybe it's the cavalry after all._

 _I distract Marietta from the scene and say, "Let's check the radio."_

 _It's as I expect. The radio has been purposefully fried, but Marietta doesn't know her ass from her armpit when it comes to helicopters and planes and electronic equipment. "It must have been an electrical problem," I say to the red-headed lunatic next to me in the cockpit._

" _He's breathing again," the woman calls out._

 _I take a deep breath and resign myself to biding my time until I have the opportunity to let this woman know I'm not the enemy here._

* * *

We don't go guns blazing into the house. My blood is finally pumping, thick with adrenaline, and I'm tempted to, but the last thing we need at this moment is for someone to scream. Or an errant bullet to fly that would alert Marietta and Patrick that all is not peaceful in this house before they get back here with JJ and Nick.

Gil and I practically tiptoe up the front steps and I turn the knob on the front door quietly. The living room is surprisingly quaint with simple country furniture and an old player piano against one wall.

Embry doesn't hear us, doesn't even turn, just keeps heading towards what looks like the kitchen. The young girl with blond hair - Holly - is following him and still holding the toddler. _Adrian_. It's that little boy who sees us first, his head perched over Holly's shoulder. His wide blue eyes look like his mother's, but the rest of his face is his father's. I shake off the shiver I feel run through my body.

"Father Christmas?" he asks while looking at Gil.

 _Jerry Garcia to me and Santa Claus to a toddler. Damn. I don't know if I can do this_.

Going against every instinct I have, I raise my gun and point it at the child. "Turn around. Nobody make a sound," I say calmly.

Holly turns and clutches Adrian to her. She doesn't look frightened, she doesn't look anything at all. She just stares at us mutely. Embry, on the other hand, whimpers, and then looks like he's going to scream.

"I fucking mean it!" I say harshly. "Put your hands up Embry. If you make a sound I'll put a bullet right in your head. You're no value to us. What was that note you left in my house? Your turn to pay the piper, asshole."

Evidently he believes me, because he bites his lip and remains quiet as he raises his hands. "In the kitchen," I say raising my chin and indicating the way. I want us out of sight of the front door.

We step forward and I lean my head towards Gil. "Get him tied up."

I stand calmly. I'd told JJ ten minutes; I needed her to buy us ten minutes from the time whomever inside the house showed up at the helicopter until they headed back our way. According to my watch, I still have eight minutes left. I watch until Embry is cuffed to a kitchen chair, his feet are tied and the strip of duct tape is placed over his mouth.

I lower my gun and look at Holly and Adrian. When Adrian begins to fuss, she clamps her hand over his mouth. I'm trying to come up with some brilliant fucking plan. I won't hurt the baby, but I don't know what to do with a teenager who can identify us. I take in her watery eyes and the chaffing around her neck from a collar.

"Are you going to kill me?" she whispers with trembling lips.

There's no way I can kill her, but at the moment, I feel like I'm about to lose the meager lunch I managed to eat all over her.

"Fran," Gil hisses to remind me, and I nod. I've got to get it together.

I reach into the pocket of Clyde's tactical jacket and finger the syringe there, using my thumb to push off the cap. "I'm not going to kill you," I say as I step towards her.

"It's okay if you do," she whimpers.

Before I can think about those words, I move my hand. The needle plunges into her thigh before she can react and it's only a few seconds later that she's slumping towards the floor. I catch her, and thereby catch Adrian as she falls, trying to lessen the impact.

"He's about 30 pounds," I say to Gil when I right myself with the baby in my arms. He nods and reaches into my pocket for another syringe, releasing nearly all but a small bit of the liquid before plunging it into Adrian's thigh. He whimpers slightly and stares at me for a few brief moments, and then his eyes flutter closed and he slumps against me.

Three minutes left.

"Watch him," I say to Gil. I lay the little boy on Holly and grab her arms, pulling them both around the corner of the kitchen island. I don't know what the hell we're going to do with either of them, and I'm frantically trying to alter my plan.

Get Fran and call Marcus Klaus is the only thing I can come up with. Let the authorities handle the clean up. No matter how much I want no loose ends, the thought of killing a woman in cold blood while her child is in the house is something I don't think I'm capable of.

I'm about to turn to Gil and say something to that effect when we hear footsteps on the front porch. We press ourselves against the wall of the kitchen, both of our guns raised at Embry as we hear the front door open.

"I saved my whole life to come to Europe. I haven't even been here a day and this happens," says JJ with a slightly shaky voice.

"Help Patrick get the pilot on the couch and I'll make you a cup of tea, Love," Marietta says. "Then you can use our phone."

I hear the front door close, feet shuffling and the unmistakable click of a lock and then the rattling of keys. My eyes open wide and I look at Gil, who is looking equally concerned.

Marietta calls out, "Embry. Holly. Where are are you?"

I raise my rifle on my shoulder and point it at Embry. But it makes no difference how quiet and compliant he's being, because just a moment later, I hear Marietta's voice again.

"Tell me, Jennifer Jareau, did you really think that brown hair and brown contact lenses would make me not recognize you?" She laughs before she continues, "Well, perhaps I wouldn't have if Embry hadn't been drooling over your pictures all summer long. More than drooling. He took quite a liking to looking at your face while participating in activities of a more...personal nature. I used to laugh as I watched him. I feel like I know your face as well as my own at this point."

I'm about two seconds away from full-blown panic. _What do you know, Emily?_ Clyde's voice echos in my head, calming me.

 _She's got a son. She's obsessed with Adrian and had his son,_ I think.

 _It's all poker, Em. Remember that. If you get dealt a shitty hand, it's all about getting inside your opponent's head and making them believe your bluff. You can do this._

The sound of feet shuffling our direction is evident. "EMBRY!" Marietta yells. "I have a present for you. I'll let you play with her before I kill her. Where the fuck are you, you useless bastard?"

She's clearly crazy. I learned a long time ago after years of going undercover that the best way to fight someone is to become like them. She doesn't care that much about Embry. She won't buy it if I say more people are on their way.

I can play a mean game of crazy when I have to, and it's time to go all in. _Game over_ , I think. _But not for us._

After being out of this line of work for over two years, I'm all adrenaline and rage again at the immediate threat to JJ, a woman who is like family to me. The numbness I was feeling is long gone. No way is anyone putting their hands on JJ. No way in hell is this going south. I'm bringing Fran _and_ JJ home.

I get the knife out of my pocket and slice it across Embry's throat before he even knows what's happening. Before Marietta rounds the corner with JJ, I've got a sleeping Adrian back in my arms, my handgun cocked at his face. Gil doesn't miss a beat, turning and pointing his gun towards the opening of the kitchen.

 _Who the fuck am I?_ It's the voice of the Emily of the past two years rattling around in my head, but I don't have time for her right now.

Marietta gasps when she rounds the corner clutching JJ's body in front of hers and sees the situation. Gil, with his gun pointing at her and Patrick. Embry slumped over, dead at the kitchen table, with a pool of blood forming around the base of the chair and on the table. And me, with a gun pointed at her child's head.

JJ's eyes open wide in disbelief at the sight.

"Put the fucking gun down!" I yell. "Your son is only sleeping now, but I can make that permanent and I will. Put the gun down and back away."

Marietta presses her gun more firmly against JJ's temple and I don't hesitate. I turn my gun and aim at Patrick, who's right behind her, taking aim and hitting him in the left shoulder. He grunts and goes down. _That's right, asshole. I'm a far better shot than I am a fuck._

"I fucking mean it! The next bullet goes in your son's head," I scream.

She hesitates for only a second and then loosens her grip on JJ and lowers the gun. "OK. Just give me my boy," she cries. Her eyes are crazy, but filled with tears.

Gil reaches out and grabs JJ, pulling her behind him. "Gun in my backpack," he says quietly to her.

"Put the gun on the floor!" I scream at Marietta.

Marietta does, and I lay Adrian on the ground. I go to her and pat her down, finding only keys.

"Where's Fran?" I demand.

"My boy," she says.

I can see Nick now, passed out on the sofa and a nasty looking gash on his forehead. I'm vaguely aware of JJ, now armed, entering the picture and patting Patrick down. She stops when she reaches his GPS unit and glances at me. "It's a bomb," Patrick grunts.

And it's in that one sentence that my focus shifts away from Marietta and thoughts of a barbiturate that might loosen her tongue. Maybe we don't need her tongue at all.

Gil keeps his gun on Marietta who's crying for her son while I stand over Patrick. "Where's Fran?" I ask him.

"Basement. Behind the shelf with the canned goods in the kitchen. But those aren't the keys. She keeps the keys for the basement in her bedroom upstairs."

Marietta becomes a snarling monster at those words, her son momentarily forgotten. She lunges towards Patrick and Gil brings the butt of his gun down on her head, silencing her into unconsciousness.

I raise my chin at JJ and nod towards the stairs. She's off in a flash.

"Who's helping you? Someone has to be," I say to Patrick.

Patrick manages to sit up, his right hand clutching his left shoulder. "I don't know. But I think it's the person who helps send the pictures of Fran. The computer is in the basement, too."

"Why?" Why are you telling us this?" I ask.

Patrick considers me. "I never wanted to be here. You're prettier as a brunette," he says.

That tells me that he recognized me, remembers me, and likely didn't tell Marietta that he knew me.

"Are your kids okay?" he asks.

I don't have time for the gratitude I feel for his sincerity that I don't understand. I give him nothing more than my hard stare as JJ comes down the stairs with keys in her hand.

"Watch him," I say to Gil.

JJ and I shove the shelf away in the kitchen and we experiment with keys until we find the one that opens the door. The staircase is longer than I would have expected, and I'm reminded of Adrian Stancu and his obsession with underground rooms and passageways. Nearly two stories down, we come to the landing and see three doors.

"Fran!" I scream.

I hear nothing at first and then a low moan that's barely audible through the thick wooden door to my left. JJ jumps forward, fumbling with the keys.

The door opens, and Fran's there. She's right there. She's gagged and dirty and naked and beaten and strapped to a table, but the woman who I think of as a mother more than my own mother is is right in front of me.

I don't quite contain the sob in my throat as I move to unfasten her wrists. JJ works on her ankles. "Fran," I whisper.

"My Emily," her voice rings out softly. She's present and strong and still her.

She sits up on the table and I shrug the backpack containing clothing off my shoulders. I toss it at JJ, who has tears streaming down her cheeks. I can't give way to tears just yet. "Help her get dressed. I have to find the computer. We have to find whoever else was involved."

"The baby," JJ says.

"There's a teenager, too," I respond. I shake my head, at a temporary loss. "I don't know."

JJ nods and tosses me the keys. I give one extra moment to Fran and kiss her cheek.

I find the equipment room next to Fran's room and go straight to the computer, ignoring the pictures of myself and my family hanging on the walls. I briefly take in the guns and bombs on the table. I grab the burn phone from my pocket.

"We've got her," I say when Garcia answers. "I need to know everything that's on the computer sitting in front of me."

I keep my eyes low as I follow Garcia's instructions to grab the IP address of the computer, but once I give it to her, they keep drifting up of their own accord. The picture above the computer is identical to one we have at home. Taken back in June, it's the four of us, Rory laughing while sitting on Derek's shoulders and me kissing the top of Derek's head while Leon smiles in his lap. It was taken on Derek's birthday, just from a farther vantage point and a slightly different angle than the one in my possession.

My eyes well at the thought of my family, the first time I've let them enter my heart and mind fully since I got on the plane to London. I don't know what to do. The plan was always to kill the people behind this and set one person up to take the fall. Now I've got a teenager and toddler upstairs and a man I killed in cold blood strapped to a chair in a quaint English kitchen.

I'm distracted from my thoughts by a beep. I look up to see where the sound came from just as Garcia hisses frantically in my ear, "Get out of there, Emily. The camera on the computer is on and someone is watching you right now."

I hear her voice at the same time I see forty-five seconds begin to tick down on the two bombs on the table.

"JJ!"

She's there in the doorway with Fran. "Go!" I scream.

We scramble up the endless stairs. Fran is running on her own, thankfully. "Jayje, the girl by the kitchen island. Grab her if you can. We have about thirty seconds before this place blows. Fran you go straight out the front door."

I suck in a breath and scream out as we approach the kitchen door. "GIL! Get Nick and get out of here!"

It all moves seamlessly before me as we hit the kitchen landing and turn towards the living room. Gil has Nick, supporting him with his shoulder. JJ immediately goes to the girl and grabs her, dragging her towards the front door, and Fran keeps running towards the front of the house. Patrick has keys in his hands and is unlocking the door.

And I bend to grab the baby. We have less than ten seconds and I'm stepping towards the door that is now open. I'm only behind them by a couple of steps when I feel something grab my ankle. I pitch forward and land hard on top of Adrian.

I look back. Marietta has my ankle in her hand. "Give me my son," she snarls.

Just then, I'm rocked by what feels like a thousand earthquakes as the bombs go off in the basement. The floor gives under Marietta first and she disappears, her grip on my ankle gone in a moment of shock as she falls to the fiery pit below.

It takes a second for me to realize that I have no purchase under my feet, the floor is literally disappearing from under me. I lunge out towards the piano and grab onto one leg and manage to snag my other hand on Adrian's sweater as the floor completely falls from under us.

I can feel the heat below me and my sweaty palm is slipping on the leg of a piano that is still, miraculously, on a bit of remaining floor in the living room. I can't pull myself up with an unconscious child grasped in my free hand, and I'm going to fall any second.

* * *

" _How did you do that?" I called. I was breathless, sitting on a small rock ledge. My shoulders ached in a good way and I didn't dare look down, knowing that a two-hundred yard drop of sheer rock surface was all I'd see. Instead, I looked up about twenty yards, where Derek's feet dangled over the edge of the peak of this climb._

 _It was a wildly unseasonably warm Saturday in February and Derek suggested heading to Roanoke for the weekend. I'd agreed. Then he suggested an easy rock climb, and I'd agreed. I wasn't a complete novice to rock climbing, but it had been a long time. Now I didn't know what I was doing - I was literally stuck between a rock and a hard place, my only safety net a harness and Derek's capable hands._

" _Pretend you don't have a harness, and just go for it, Emily. You can do it. I won't let you fall."_

" _That's your expert advice? Just go for it?"_

" _Yep!"_

 _I smiled at the confidence in his voice. I blew on my fingers to warm them. This wasn't a hard climb, and if I couldn't make it to the top, I could always repel down or have Derek pull me up. But I wanted to make it on my own and get up there with him._

 _So I stood. I stood and reached for that little lip of rock I thought I couldn't reach before. I pretended I didn't have a harness, that it was just that rock separating me from Derek, and stretched myself completely and then gave a little jump. My fingers landed firmly where they needed to be._

 _I let everything go, all fear, all apprehension, my only thought about getting to him. And I climbed._

 _When I finally hoisted my leg over the cliff's edge, I laughed. I rolled onto my back and looked up at him and the cool, blue sky above him and laughed. This had been a good idea, a distraction when we needed it. Neither one of us wanted to pretend our existence surrounded me trying to get pregnant, and neither one of us was doing a very good job._

 _I didn't know back then that I was already pregnant; I would have never taken on that climb if I had known. I didn't know that in a few days, we'd get a call about Leon. At that moment, it was only me and Derek and an otherwise seemingly deserted national park._

 _I looked at him, his face in shadows because of the blinding sun, and laughed merrily._

" _Hungry?" he asked._

" _Very," I said. But when he handed me a sandwich, I pushed it away. "That's not what I meant."_

 _I could see the white of his teeth as he grinned. "Here?" he asked._

 _All I had to do was nod once before his lips were on mine._

 _I never felt the roughness of the rocky surface on my back that day; I only saw the resulting minor scrapes later in the bathroom mirror at our hotel. I stopped feeling cold the second his body formed a blanket mine._

 _He was my harness in life, and no matter if I never got pregnant, or whatever our future held, we weren't going to let go of each other…_

There's a ledge of wood to my left and if I can get my other hand on it, I'll be able to hoist my leg up and over and onto the floor remaining around the piano. I can almost see Derek sitting there on that ledge, his legs dangling over the edge, his smile lighting up his face while he waits for me.

"Emily!" JJ's voice calls out. "Hang on. We're trying to figure out how to get to you. There's not much floor left. We're coming!"

I'm barely hanging on and don't know if I can make it long enough for someone to help me.

I sob in despair and close my eyes for a brief second before opening them. I make a decision in that moment that I never thought I could make in my life. I have to get home; there's no other option. And that means I have to let the baby in my hand go.

"Forgive me," I whisper. I'm not sure if I'm saying it to the unconscious child dangling by his sweater in my left hand, or to a God I'm not sure I believe in, or to Derek or my children or my family or myself. But I say it and start to release my fingers from Adrian's sweater.


	10. Chapter 10

_Emily's wasn't a bad cook. In fact, she'd pulled off some concoctions from Clyde's recipe books that have been downright some of the best food I've ever eaten. But when it came to baking anything from scratch, she'd been fairly hopeless._

 _Ridiculously hopeless._

 _So hopeless that every time she tried, I fell a little bit more in love with her, if that was even possible._

 _It's like some people with house plants. They can follow all of the rules, from sunlight to watering to temperature, and still the plants would die. That was all of Emily's baking experiments in the time we'd lived together - they'd all died a slow, painful death._

 _My last birthday fell on a Wednesday. Chris was visiting Andrew in Delaware for a few days. My mother was gone because my sister was having surgery; she'd return on Friday and we'd celebrate my birthday on Saturday with everyone and one of my mother's cakes. I had an all-day meeting scheduled at the DOJ, and Emily was still with the Department of Defense full-time. So that morning, I'd dropped Rory and Leon off with JJ, who was off work for the day._

 _My meeting was cut short due to some emergency where my skills weren't required. Even though Emily was going to pick the kids up from JJ's after work, I decided to head there. I welcomed the extra time with the kids; in a few short months, my job would become full-time, and getting a break like this, mid-day on a weekday summer afternoon, would be rare._

 _When I got to JJ's, she looked very surprised to see me at the door. I could hear Rory babbling and Leon and Henry playing. She grinned when I told her my meeting had been cut short. She put her hand on my chest and pushed me out of the doorway. "Go home," she said._

" _What?" I asked._

 _She patted my chest. "Just go home. Trust me."_

 _So I drove home, not sure what to expect. When I arrived at the house, there was the very evident smell of burned food and a slight, smoky haze in the air. I found Emily in the kitchen staring at a cake pan that held nothing more than a charred mess. She had a towel wrapped around her, and her hair was dripping wet, like she'd run from the shower when she'd smelled the burning cake. Or maybe when she heard the smoke alarm._

" _What in the ever loving fuck?" she cursed at the ruined cake._

 _I laughed. I couldn't help myself. The sound startled her and she looked at me apologetically. Then she quirked her eyebrow. "What are you doing home?"_

" _My meeting ended early."_

" _The oven hates me," she said sadly, looking at the ruined cake._

" _It's perfect," I said as I stepped towards her._

 _She rolled her eyes. "I'm pretty sure I could sprout a second head, and you'd still think I or anything I made was perfect."_

 _My fingers trailed through the wet, tangled mess of her hair and I gazed at her face. "Probably," I said before I kissed her. I pulled away and surveyed the kitchen and then opened the refrigerator. Steaks marinating, vegetables already cut up and ready to cook, and a bowl of frosting greeted me. I grinned and grabbed the bowl, dipping my finger inside the bowl and then bringing it to my mouth to taste it._

" _The frosting's delicious."_

" _I didn't have to bake that," she replied, somewhat dejected._

 _I put the frosting on the counter, kicked the refrigerator door closed, wrapped my arms around her and let my lips trail over the damp skin on her neck. "You took the day off to bake me a cake for my birthday?" I queried._

" _And make you dinner," she replied a little breathlessly, tilting her neck to give me better access._

" _Hmmm. How late are the kids staying at JJ's?"_

 _Her breath caught when I ran my lips over the shell of her ear, but she managed to answer. "Leon's spending the night. She said she or Will would bring Rory home between 8:30 and 9:00."_

" _Hours then," I whispered in her ear. Before she could respond, I lifted her into my arms and deposited her on the kitchen table. "Lay back," I told her._

 _With a raised eyebrow and a small smile on her lips, she laid back casually on the table with her hands behind her head. I went for the tuck on the towel first and peeled the terry cloth away from her body. I could think of no better birthday dinner than the feast before me on the kitchen table, the velvety smoothness of her skin, the slight smell of lavender from the body wash she used, the way her nipples puckered in the air conditioned room._

 _I smiled at her and kissed her nose, then turned for the bowl of frosting and a spatula._

" _What are you doing?" she asked._

" _Having my cake and eating it, too," I said._

 _She rolled her eyes at that line and then graced me with one of her delicious, light laughs. "Have at it, birthday boy."_

 _I smeared a healthy amount of frosting over her belly button and she sucked in a breath, goose flesh rising on her skin. "Shit, that's cold."_

" _Hang on, Em. I'm getting inspired." I put the bowl and spatula down and opened the small cupboard above the stove, finding the birthday candles and a book of matches. "Stay very still," I whispered as I pushed one candle into the small mound of frosting. Her eyes were on mine, and then on the match in my hand, her breath shallow so the candle wouldn't fall over._

" _Do you want me to sing?" she asked when the candle was lit._

 _I laughed. "No time for that. I don't think it's going to stay up very long."_

 _She glanced at the bulge in my dress slacks and gave me a saucy, "It's not?"_

 _I gently nipped at her hip in response to that. "I meant the candle," I said, and then closed my eyes and blew it out._

 _She watched me as I removed the candle and licked the end of it. She hitched in another breath when my tongue swiped across her stomach, collecting some of the frosting. One of her hands moved and gently rested on my head as I set about the task of cleaning her skin._

" _What did you wish for?" she asked when I was done._

 _I raised my head and looked at her heavily-lidded eyes. I took in the way her chest rose and fell with shaky breaths, and the slight flush on her ivory skin. "That you would never attempt to make me a birthday cake again. Just frosting, and this, for every birthday for the rest of my life."_

 _She put her hand on the back of my neck and drew me down for a kiss. "Deal," she whispered against my lips. "But you're wearing too many clothes."_

 _I pulled back and grabbed the bowl of frosting. "I'm not done yet."_

 _She laughed when the next swipe of the spatula smeared frosting on her right breast._

 _I looked up when a flash of red from the kitchen window caught my eye. There was the woman with the red, curly hair and the man who helped kidnap me two years before. They were both shaking their heads and laughing at me. "She won't be making it to your next birthday, Derek," the woman said._

 _Scared, I looked down at the table, and Emily was gone._

 _And I was left with the taste of frosting and her skin on my lips, her delighted laughter still ringing in my ears._

I startle awake, my heart hammering in my chest, disoriented for a few seconds. I'm on a sofa sleeper in the den at the mansion in Delaware and Rory is sleeping peacefully beside me. I'd laid down with her for a few minutes this afternoon because she needed a nap, and wouldn't settle down on her own.

I can't believe I fell asleep. Emily and JJ are out trying to get my mother back, and I'm on a different continent taking a nap. I must have drifted off; I'd barely need both hands to count the number of hours I'd slept in the past few days, and snuggling up with Rory must have proven too much for my deprived body.

The dream comes back to me. The dream and the very twisted ending that was a far cry from the reality I remember. Reality was Emily letting me eat my fill of frosting off her body. Reality was her standing on shaky legs when I was done and divesting me of my clothing, then pushing me on the table. Reality was her taking her turn with the sugary concoction in the bowl and zeroing in on only one part of my anatomy. It was me desperate and tugging gently on her hair and arm to stop the inevitable. It was her giving in with a laugh and moving up my body, her legs on either side of me. It was us creating a sticky, sweaty mess between us as the kitchen table creaked and groaned under her undulations, and the stunningly beautiful look of release on her face, quickly followed by my own.

It was her breathing in my ear, "There are no words for how much I love you. It's like the word hasn't even been invented yet, the word that describes what I feel for you. It's beyond what a dictionary or thesaurus is capable of. It's everything good in the world multiplied infinitely."

I jump from the sofa bed, leaving Rory to slumber, my short nap feeling a lot like betraying Emily. I can see Chris, Andrew and Leon through the sliding glass door that leads to the backyard, trying to get a kite up in the air.

I find Rossi in the living room.

One look at his face with the phone pressed to his ear is all I need to know that my dream wasn't a nightmare, but perhaps a premonition.

"What happened?" I cry out, my voice hitching and breaking in fear.

Rossi shakes his head. "We don't know yet."

I grab the phone from his hand. "Garcia?"

"It's Hotch," comes the somber voice over the line. "Garcia is trying to track something right now."

"What happened?" I ask again.

"They found Fran, and then we don't know. Emily found a computer and got the IP address for Garcia, and Garcia discovered that the camera was on and someone was watching Emily while she was at the computer. She's trying to track that person now." Hotch paused and cleared his throat. "It sounds like there was an explosion."

"Let me hear," I say. My voice sounds very far away to my ears and I'm not actually sure my heart is still beating.

"Morgan," Hotch says softly. It's the first time he's used my last name to address me since I left the BAU, and I hate it. I hate it because of the emotional dismissal that I sense in his tone, like he's protecting me when he knows what I might hear could destroy me.

"Aaron," I counter. As a friend, not a colleague anymore. "I have to hear."

I hear some shuffling over the line, I can hear Garcia's voice muffled with tears. And then, "OK," from Hotch.

My wife's voice rings in my ear. My wife, the mother of our children, my best friend, my savior, my completeness, my salvation, my everything.

 _We've got her. I need to know everything that's on the computer sitting in front of me._

I listen to the back and forth between Penelope and Emily while Emily retrieves the information needed. Her voice is distracted, I can tell. Distracted by what? I wonder.

I hear the faint sound of an electronic beep. And then it's Penelope hissing on the line. _Get out of there, Emily. The camera on the computer is on and someone is watching you right now._

A second of silence and then Emily yelling, " _Go!"_

Pounding sounds, like feet running. _Jayje, the girl by the kitchen island. Grab her if you can. We have about thirty seconds before this place blows. Fran you go straight out the front door._ _Gil! Get Nick and get out of here!_

There's a clatter, like Emily dropped the phone, the faint sounds of feet. And then a loud sound of something...something falling? I can hear a grunt. I know it's Emily.

A female voice with a British accent. _Give me my boy._

A beat of silence and then a loud rumbling that is so booming I have to pull the phone away from my ear.

And then silence.

Silence. There's nothing else.

The questions are stacking up in my head. Did they try to call JJ? What's going on? Do they have any contact at all?

I can't formulate a single word. I sink to my knees on the plush carpeting in the living room and stare in the phone. I'm sobbing, I realize. I'm sobbing and rocking and my body is shaking. One hand clutched on the phone, the other clutched around the necklace and Emily's wedding ring that I'm supposed to be keeping safe for her. I feel a hand on my back, Rossi's hand. There are words coming from my mouth, but it takes me a second to hear my own voice.

"You promised," I'm sobbing over and over again into the silent phone.

* * *

I'm on an island of wood and plaster. There's barely room for my feet around the piano. There are bits and pieces of floor still supported by beams here and there, but none close enough for me to jump to. The house groans. I watch as the stairway leading to the second story starts to crumble and absorb my reality as those steps give way, falling into the basement below.

The smell of smoke is acrid and burns my eyes and nose. There's no one in the open doorway leading out to the front of the house and no way for me to get to that doorway anyway. It's crumbling. Crumbling right before my eyes.

The bit of floor I'm standing on isn't too stable. I know there are flames below, flames licking the support beams that are holding me on this perch right now.

I don't dare look down. I can't face the possibility of seeing the little body I let go of. I'm removing myself from that action as I stand here. No version of myself I ever knew would have been able to do something like that. _But if I hadn't, I'd be dead, too._

I know that. It was an inner battle, my fingers of my right hand on the piano leg slipping in harmony with my fingers of my left hand that held onto that little boy with red hair. The war had waged inside until survival kicked in and I let him go. I let him go so I could use my left hand to find purchase on the flooring and haul myself up before we both fell and died.

I still can't reconcile myself with the action of letting go of that sweater and managing to haul my body up on this miraculous piece of flooring.

There's warmth and wetness on the inside of my right arm, and I realize I must have punctured my skin when the floor initially fell from beneath me.

Where's JJ? Where's Gil? It's been less than a minute between the time JJ said they were coming and now.

I hear glass breaking, a thousand shards shattering over the roar of the groaning house around me. I look to my left, and there's Patrick Joyce of all people. Gil and JJ are there, too, right behind him. I have no context for the brightness of fabric in his hand, and can't figure out what it is for a second.

"Emily!" JJ shouts. "Grab the backpack!"

Backpack? My numb mind registers what's in Patrick's hands. It's the bright coloring of a parachute - a parachute that was probably in the helicopter - it's been twisted into a rope, and it's protruding from a backpack that he's swinging and getting ready to toss my way.

I shake my head to snap out of the horror I just committed. I did it to live, to get home to Derek and my children, like I promised him I would. I can't lose sight of that now. I turn towards the window and nod. Patrick swings the backpack my way, and my fingers that feel like they are separated from my body latch on. Just a minute ago, those fingers were clutching the sweater of a baby.

I blink and shake my head again. I pull the backpack on and not a second too soon. The bit of floor beneath me shifts, the piano tilts, a loud banging sound emanating from its organ. The floor beneath me is gone before I get the harness attached around me, but I hang on for dear life to the straps around my shoulders, grunting slightly as the weight of my body pulls the straps against my armpits and painfully presses the machine gun on my back against my skin.

And then I'm being pulled up, up, up.

Up and through the window and being carried away from the house that is collapsing before our eyes. Fran is there and she's kissing my forehead. My eyes meet Patrick's first, his because I remember everyone else getting through the front door, and he was the one who looked back right before Marietta grabbed my ankle, looked back and saw me holding the baby.

 _No matter what you did or have to do, remember that salvation can only come in finishing the job._ It's Clyde's voice that rings in my ears slams me back into the reality of an agent.

I glance away from Patrick and find Gil and JJ. "We're not done yet," I hear myself saying. "JJ, where's your phone?" Mine is gone. I dropped it when I bent to pick up the baby.

The baby. An innocent little boy.

I close my eyes briefly and sit up, shrugging the backpack off me.

JJ's nearly a blur as she runs to the helicopter to retrieve her phone. Nick is still out, as is Holly. They're on the ground near me. Fran's arms are around my neck and she's sobbing softly, and all I want to do is wrap my arms around her and fly her home. Home. Home to Derek and Rory and Leon and my dad and everyone else.

But we're not done yet. There was someone watching me on that computer. Watching me in a house where I wanted no one to know I was.

I reach into the front pocket of Patrick's jeans and grab onto keys. The keys are useless now, but it's the little black fob I'm interested in. "This detonates your ankle bracelet?" I ask.

He nods. I nod back at him and glance at the parachute. "Pack it up," I say to Patrick. "And then we have to get the decals off the side of the helicopter. This place is secluded, but not secluded enough to think that someone won't call in an explosion. We don't have much time. Gil, take Nick and Fran to the car and head towards the airstrip near here."

I turn to look at Patrick, who is stuffing the parachute as best he can back into the backpack. "You can fly?" I ask him.

He nods.

"Good. Grab Holly. We'll meet them at the airfield."

JJ runs back with her phone. "Garcia found the location of the man watching you on the computer. Geoffrey Bench." she says breathlessly. "Just outside Wexford, in Ireland. She's locked down his computer and is erasing everything."

 _Geoffrey Bench. I know that name. He was part of the staff at the home Adrian Stancu's family rented in Provence every summer, sixteen years old to Adrian's thirteen years. He was another person who was interviewed in the disappearance of Tatiana. He was in the general area where she was last seen that day so many years ago in Provence. He fell off a cliff. The police interview took place when he was in a hospital. His accident rendered him with no feeling below the waist._

JJ passes me the phone and I take it in my hand. I'm expecting to hear Garcia telling me information. Instead I hear sobbing. Sobbing coming from the man I love beyond any feeling of love I ever thought I was capable of.

"You promised you'd come back to me," he's sobbing.

I don't know what to say. I can't find myself here. I am horrible and alive. I am breathing and dead. I am lost and I can't be found until I get home, if I can be found again at all. But we're not finished yet.

So I give him what I can in the moment. "And I'll keep that promise."

* * *

The whir of the helicopter is almost deafening to my exhausted ears. I'm not happy about what's happening here, but we didn't have time to argue anymore. Gil was coming with me to get Geoffrey Bench, and so was JJ, no exceptions. That left Fran, an unconscious Nick and Holly, and Patrick.

We'd moved the car onto a little side road near the airfield. We'd left Fran with Holly and Nick and a gun. Fran, who insisted there was no way in hell anyone would find or touch her or them, who reminded me she knew how to use a gun, had told me to go.

So we went.

Patrick is our ace in the hole, and Gil and JJ know it. We'll set him up to take the fall for this, which would be easy if he wasn't behaving so damned nicely.

"She wanted to start over again. She wanted to start the auctions up again in hopes that the baby would someday run the same business his father did," he whispered in my ear before the helicopter took off from the airfield. "He wouldn't have been innocent for long."

I said nothing.

"What first?" Gil asks me. He's at the controls of the helicopter for this stretch of our journey and I know what he's asking. It really makes no difference who comes first - Patrick or Geoffrey. But the need to get Patrick away from me, to erase the person who has the best idea of what I did, that I let that baby go, is heavy on my mind.

"This first," I say to Gil.

He nods and flies the helicopter over the sea, hovering there.

Patrick looks at me. "I killed them. I took Fran. I deliver her back to the US and then I disappear?"

I have the decency to meet his eyes and nod.

He looks out the window of the helicopter. "It's a good plan." His voice is scratchy in my earpiece.

He takes off his seatbelt and turns towards me. I can feel JJ's eyes from the front seat on both of us. Patrick doesn't flinch when I raise a gun at him. He does reach forward and push the gun down, though. "You've done enough today, I think. I've done so little good in my life for anyone else. Let me do this for you."

I am numb when he reaches for the keys in my other hand. I am numb when JJ hisses, "Emily" and raises her gun towards Patrick. I feel the cool blast of air when Patrick opens door of the helicopter and slides it open. He looks back at me and takes off his earpiece.

"For you to go home again with Fran and make sure you're never questioned about being here feels a lot like the absolution I was looking for before I died. Thank you," he says loud enough for me to hear.

Before I can say a word, he jumps. I lurch forward in my seat to watch him fall into the darkness below. Before he lands in the water, a blast of orange shatters the night, the bomb on his ankle going off. He'll be shark bait before he ever washes up to shore.

I wish I had tears. As confusing as it is, tears would be appropriate right now. But I have nothing. I blink and close the door of the helicopter again. "Let's go," I say.

"Emily," JJ whispers again.

I put my head down, not able to meet her eyes. Gil is quiet, flying on towards Ireland.

We eventually land on a field behind the address Garcia gave us. I move to stand, but JJ's body is in front of mine before I even know she moved from her seat. "You _have_ done enough. You stay. We'll take care of this."

I am physically and emotionally tapped out, but I still move to stand. She presses her hands on my shoulders and then Gil is there. He kisses my forehead. "Enough," he says.

I stare at them and finally nod. I'd be more of a liability at this point than any help and I know that. I watch them take off towards the house and my body starts shaking. The tears I've controlled since I let go of that little boy in my hand rise up in me and cascade down my face at an alarming rate.

 _Clyde,_ I think. _Does salvation come when you let someone else finish the job?"_

I clutch my gun and wait, but Clyde's voice is quiet in my head.


	11. Chapter 11

_We made it through Rory's first winter without her having so much as the sniffles, which was astounding. Leon and Derek had both had a couple of minor viruses, and I ended up with a nasty cold in February that necessitated Derek taking over feeding duty for a few nights, but Rory came through that unscathed. We marveled at the miracle that was our baby - her smiles followed by her laughter and the way her eyes lit up much like ours did whenever Leon, Fran or my father entered the room. And we marveled at her immune system, which seemed iron-clad._

 _Then, at the beginning of July, when she was coming up on eleven months old, her immune system took a flop. It was almost like she'd stored up all the germs from the winter and let loose on us a snotty, coughing, miserable little baby that couldn't be consoled._

 _Derek blamed one of Leon's friends who seemed to spend an unfortunate amount of time with his fingers up his nose. I blamed the camping trip over the July fourth weekend that Derek and Will had insisted upon like a giddy boy scouts._

 _Fran laughed lovingly at us both and told us it was just another notch in the parenthood belt and to get used to it._

 _Bleary-eyed after two nights of almost no sleep and Rory's frustrated and miserable cries ringing in my ears, I escaped the house for an hour to drop Leon at JJ's on a Saturday afternoon, buy a new humidifier, and inject myself with much-needed caffeine._

 _When I arrived home, it was shockingly quiet. Was my baby girl finally sleeping? I crept up the stairs, not daring to call out for Derek and break the spell of peaceful silence in the house._

 _Rory wasn't in her crib, and she wasn't sleeping next to Derek in our bed. I found them in our bathroom, both of them in the tub, Rory's little body laying on Derek's chest, submerged to her shoulders in warm water._

 _She wasn't sleeping, but she wasn't crying, either. Derek's eyes looked just as tired as mine, but he smiled softly at me. "I thought a bath might help, but she didn't want to let go of me. So I improvised. She stopped crying."_

 _They painted a beautiful picture together, Rory's slightly lighter cheek against his strong chest, her dark brown eyes blinking at me. Even the snot running out of her chapped little nose didn't detract from father and daughter like this._

 _She lifted her head from his chest and graced me with the first smile I'd seen on her face in a couple of days. And then, clear as a bell, and absolute and direct, she said, "Mama."_

 _She'd babbled a lot over the past few months, stringing together sounds that we thought were words, but they never had direct context to anything. This was different, I knew it and Derek knew it. His tired eyes got watery first, and I felt emotionally bowled over._

 _Who needs sleep or caffeine when their baby first calls them Mama? I was suddenly wide awake and alive again, and I smiled at Rory._

" _Mama," she said again, like she was calling to me. So I answered her. I stripped off my clothes, took her from Derek's arms and slid into the water with my back against his chest._

" _Rory," I whispered and kissed her face._

 _I never thought I'd be the type of mother who would get into a bath with her baby. I never thought I'd be the type of mother who reveled in breastfeeding and the pre-dawn feedings when we'd let her snuggle up in our bed and sleep out the remaining hours of night with us surrounding her._

 _Hell, a year and a half before that afternoon in our bathtub, I never thought I'd be a mother at all._

 _Rory drifted off with the warm water around her little body and her cheek on my chest, sleeping finally. The water was relaxing and my heart was full. I leaned my head back against Derek's shoulder, my eyelids suddenly too heavy to keep open. I felt his lips against my cheek. "Sleep, Mama. I'll stay awake and keep an eye on you both."_

 _He was just as tired as I was, but I knew he would stay awake and make sure we were both safe. I let my eyes flutter closed._

 _This all seemed perfectly natural and good and right, and like many times since I'd had Rory, I tried to imagine my mother with me when I was a baby. Had she melted when I first called her Mama? Had she ever taken the time to forget about her political goals, her next meeting, what was happening in the world, and just hold me and let everything else go?_

 _I never asked her, because I knew the answers. No. My father provided me with emotional warmth and security when I was younger, not my mother. Never my mother. She's better now, slightly warmer, but I knew when I was a baby, it was my dad's arms that were my exclusive stronghold on comfort._

 _I never had to ask Fran what type of a mother she was either, because I knew the answer as well. She was like I was in that moment. She was the mother in the bathtub and the mother who could while away hours in a rocking chair with her babies. She was ease and warmth and love that stretched and grew and absorbed._

 _That night, when Rory was breathing easier and Leon was home again, we settled on the couch together and turned on a movie. We were tangled together in loving touch. Derek laid on his back on the couch, his head propped up on pillows and Rory slept contentedly on his chest. I was pressed against his side, my head somewhere around his ribs, one hand holding Rory's and one on Leon's head. Leon was curled up in the boat of my legs, his head resting on my thigh._

 _My little family didn't make it far into the movie before they were all asleep, but I was wide awake, taking it all in. That was how Fran found us, when she came to check in before turning in for the night. She'd been volunteering all day at a carnival at her church and the last time we'd seen her was that morning when she'd left with two trays of lasagna and a kiss for all of us._

 _I raised smiled at her when she came in the living room and whispered, "She called me 'Mama' today."_

 _Fran walked towards the couch, a smile on her own face, and bent over Derek and Rory to kiss my head. "You remind me so much of me when I was a mother with young children. It's like I'm getting to live it all again, just watching you. I love it every day. I love you, Emily. Now, do you want me to help untangle you and get everyone to bed?"_

The moon's full tonight. I didn't notice it until the plane took off and we climbed above the heavy blanket of clouds in the sky over the UK. We've barely had a chance to breathe because it's imperative that we get ourselves back to DC as quickly as possible, on the off chance that someone finds Patrick Joyce's body. It's crucial that that not happen until Fran is back stateside for at least eight hours, hopefully more.

In the short term, I'm counting on the current cover of darkness and the cold air of Ireland to keep people away from the rocky beaches, the place where his body might wash ashore. In the long term, I'm counting on the rough tide and bloody pulp of his leg to keep him in the sea forever.

Geoffrey Bench is dead. He didn't even put up a fight. When JJ and Gil entered his house, he was sitting in his wheelchair, resigned to his fate. He probably knew we were coming the second Garcia locked down his computer, and he couldn't get far in a wheelchair on his own.

Without any danger present, JJ and Gil took the time to knock him out with drugs before Gil put a bullet in his head. It was as compassionate of a necessary death as they could make it. They apparently discussed burning down the house, but ultimately decided to leave things as they were. The only danger to us was my face in that house in England on his computer, and Garcia had taken care of that.

The rest of it - copies of pictures, the journals JJ found - they told the story of how Adrian Stancu and Geoffrey were tied together by a rape and murder they'd committed as teenagers, they told what had really happened to Tatiana in Provence so many years ago. We wanted the story to get out, for Tatiana's family to finally be able to find their little girl's bones and hopefully find peace.

Gil said he'd call in an anonymous tip so that Geoffrey's body and journals would be found, but only after we were all safely home.

I'd stopped crying the moment I saw them coming back to the helicopter after leaving Geoffrey's house, and I hadn't started again.

Holly was the first person to ask a direct question about Adrian Junior. Still groggy and laying on Gil's sofa, she looked at me and asked, "Where's Adrian?"

A suitable reply locked in my throat and JJ spoke up with a soft, "There was an explosion."

The young woman stared in horror. "I delivered him, you know. I was fourteen years old and I had a collar and chain around my neck, and Marietta pulled on that chain while I brought that baby into the world." Holly sobbed then, and pressed her face into the sofa cushion, and I couldn't face it.

I turned away to look for Fran. I found her in the kitchen, her impeccable manners all but forgotten, replaced with gnawing, agonizing hunger. She was gorging herself on food and talking to Gil, who was heating something for her on the stove.

"I need to hear your side of the story," I told her softly.

In between bites of food, tears born of fear and relief, and looks of empathy and gratitude towards me, she told me what she remembered, from start to finish.

"I wasn't raped," Fran said while taking a bite of chicken, much like someone would say, "I wasn't tired," or, "I wasn't hungry," or, "I wasn't sleeping."

 _I wasn't raped._

Relief swelled in my heart, and I was grateful I still had some genuine emotion left on the surface of my being. I'd been doing a pretty good job of packing my emotions away, a systematic process I was well familiar with but hadn't had much practice with in the past couple of years; the process felt both necessary and frightening in the moment.

"Patrick wouldn't let them," she continued.

My relief crashed with guilt. We couldn't leave him alive, and I think in the end he much prefered death over going back to prison anyway, but to know that he'd protected her in that house as best as he could made me feel things I shouldn't feel for a pedophile, rapist, kidnapper and drug dealer.

When Fran was finished, I squeezed her shoulder. She'd rattled off the details with little emotion, but I knew they would come later. She was operating on mild shock and basic needs, like food, right now. Everything else would crash over her soon.

I quickly told her our side of the story, omitting one crucial detail about the death of one little boy. I wasn't ready to face it. JJ came into the kitchen at some point while I was talking.

"Marietta grabbed my ankle and I fell hard on top of Adrian. Then the bombs exploded and the ground fell out from under us. Marietta and Adrian fell, and I grabbed onto the piano leg."

 _Marietta and Adrian fell and I grabbed onto the piano leg. Marietta and Adrian fell and I grabbed onto the piano leg._ Maybe if I said it enough, it could become my truth.

Fran stared at me, and I couldn't read her expression.

"Maybe we should have called the authorities when we found the house," I said quietly while she stared at me. "I thought about it once we saw there was a toddler and a teenager in the house, but then Marietta recognized JJ, and I had to just get us out of there."

 _I slit the throat of a tied-up, subdued man, held a gun to a toddler's face, and shot Patrick in the arm in order for Marietta to realize she was up against someone she couldn't fuck with._

Fran, whose instinct was to comfort and protect, shook her head. "You did the absolute best you could. You did what you thought was right for the safety of your family. They can't come after us anymore."

"Besides," JJ interjected, "if we had called the police, who knows what the outcome would have been?"

There was some truth there. The police could have charged in and those bombs could have gone off before they got Fran out. We'll never know for sure.

We left Nick at Gil's house with a raging headache and an emotionally broken teenage girl. He said he could handle it. We didn't know what would ultimately happen to Holly. Yes, she could place us in that house. Gil promised he'd take care of her, and take care of "things," if he thought we were in danger.

I promised Nick I'd be better about keeping in touch. I told him I'd send him some money to keep him on his feet until he could start working again. I placed a kiss on his cheek and, with Gil's permission, pressed Clyde's King's Badge into his hand, the badge awarded to the best all-around recruit in the Royal Marines. "You can find yourself again," I told Nick.

 _Can I?_

We couldn't permit Fran to shower. We had to set a believable stage, a stage that Hotch expertly scripted and filled with necessary props. And that meant when we got back to Scotland and to the plane that was Marietta's - the plane that likely originally flew Fran here with Patrick in the cockpit - I also had to inject Fran with drugs.

I'd grilled her on the two hour drive back to the airfield. _Stick to the truth right up until we showed up in that room in the basement. There was a man in the kitchen at our house last Wednesday. He knocked you out and took you. You came to when you arrived at a house. You didn't know how long you were out, where you were or how you'd gotten there. There was a woman there. You never saw anyone else. You were kept locked in a basement where you were beaten and they took pictures of you. Patrick was nice to you._

"He was," Fran had interjected at that point.

I nodded and kept going. _Patrick was nice to you. He was apologetic and tried to give you extra food when he could. Then, sometime today or yesterday, you can't be certain of the time or day, he came to you and unlocked you. He told you it was time to go home. He injected you with something. You came to on the ground, wrapped in a blanket and laying under a payphone. Patrick must have called the police or FBI, because when you opened your eyes, there were already flashing lights coming your way. You're not sure where you were, you're not certain how long you were gone, you don't remember how you got there, if you were ever on a plane, if you ever left the country or not._

"I understand," Fran said quietly. She clasped my cold hand, and it took everything in me not to pull away. I didn't feel worthy of her affection at the time.

"Repeat it," I said softly.

And Fran did, perfectly and convincingly.

"The only person you're probably going to have to give your statement to is Hotch. They're going to take you to a hospital to have you checked out. They're going to process and take pictures of everything - your clothes, the marks on your body. And they're going to run a blood test, which is why I have to put you out when we get to the plane."

"I understand, Emily," Fran said again.

She leaned over in the seat and kissed my cheek and wrapped her arms around me. "Thank you. I wasn't ready to go yet," she said.

Something inside me gave in at her words and her touch, the piece of me who remembered this woman's arms and her hugs and unconditional love, and the point of all of this. I returned her hug. "I love you," I whispered...

She sleeps peacefully now curled up over two seats on the plane, her stomach full for the first time in days, clothed and with blankets covering her, and her arms and legs free to move.

I'm left with JJ's eyes burning a hole in the back of my head as I stare at the full moon through the window. We'll land around three o'clock in the morning eastern standard time.

Garcia will be there in her personal vehicle, waiting for JJ.

Rossi will be there in his personal vehicle waiting for me, to bring me back to Delaware, and to Derek and my beautiful children and my father.

When we get off the plane, on a small airfield outside of Annapolis, we'll move Fran. The drugs in her system should wear of a bit before we land. Rossi will put me in a car immediately, to get me back to Delaware in time for me to shower and get ready to be the relieved daughter-in-law when Fran is found. They'll give us a forty-five minute head start. Then Gil will call the FBI anonymously from the payphone, he'll ask for Hotch by name. Hotch, who is currently still at headquarters, pouring over the details of this case like the compassionate, obsessed patriarch he is, will still be there when the call comes in. Reid will be with him, a worried friend unable to go home.

Gil will leave after the call. He'll leave the plane that we've thoroughly wiped down. He'll disappear into the streets and use one of his fake IDs to fly commercial home sometime tomorrow.

Garcia and JJ will stay with Fran until just a couple of minutes before Hotch and Reid arrive, lights flashing. They'll find Fran under the payphone. They'll get her to the hospital first. And only then will Hotch call us to let us know Fran has been found.

Easy. Compared to everything else, this is an easy plan.

I sigh and refuse to turn my head to look at JJ. When she realizes this, she reaches out her hand and takes mine where I've held it protectively against my chest. "We're all going home. I would have done the same thing for my family, Emily. And you would have helped me," she says softly.

It's true. The only problem is, she doesn't know the full extent of what I did. I can't see JJ letting go of that baby.

 _Marietta and Adrian fell and I grabbed onto the piano leg._ _Marietta and Adrian fell and I grabbed onto the piano leg._

* * *

It's four-twenty-three in the morning when she comes back to me. I think I'll always remember that time, my body waking automatically for the rest of my life when the clock ticks to that moment. I'll look over at her beside me in bed and have to remind myself that she came back like she promised she would.

I've filled Chris in on the story, so he can play it off when we get to my mother. The kids are fast asleep, snuggled together on the sofa bed in the den. And we've been waiting on bated breath for over thirty minutes, or for four days, depending on how you think about it.

The lights on Rossi's car flash through the curtains in the living room, and Chris and I stand in unison. Two figures make their way from the driveway to the front of the house. I have the door open and the porch light on.

Rossi looks like he's clenching his teeth, both in frustration and relief.

And Emily. She looks like she's just been delivered back to me after wading her way through a war zone, which is pretty close to the truth.

We don't run to each other and embrace. I want to, but everything about her body language tells me to move with caution. She's in boots and jeans and a black turtleneck under Clyde's jacket. She holds a duffel bag and a small backpack; I recognize the duffel bag, but not the backpack.

I recognize her, and I don't. She steps towards me into the foyer and wraps her arms around me in slow motion. Her skin and hair don't smell like her. They smell like borrowed soap and smoke and fear.

I'm sobbing in relief, but she's not crying at all. She releases me and hugs her father briefly. I'm not sure what to do.

"Em?" I ask.

She gives me the briefest of smiles and touches my hand. I clasp onto her fingers and pull her further into the house. She drops her bags.

"The kids?" she asks.

I lead her into the house and down the first floor hallway to the den. I watch as she gazes at a sleeping Leon and Rory while she stands in the doorway. Her face gives nothing away about how she's doing or what she's feeling. The details we have about what actually happened aside from the explosion are non-existent, so I can't fill in the blanks.

She seems incapable of moving. Incapable of emotion or direction or the ability to talk. I take her elbow gently in my hand. "We need to get you cleaned up before Hotch calls," I say.

And we do absolutely need to get her cleaned up. It's not just how she smells; there's soot and a scrape on her face, her hair looks like a gnarled mess in her ponytail, and my fingers on her elbow can feel the stiffness of the material there. I've felt that type of stiffness enough in my past to know that it feels like fiber that has been congealed with blood.

"Are you hurt?" I ask her.

She shakes her head.

I guide her past Chris and Rossi, who are in the hallway watching the scene mutely. I guide her up the stairs we've rarely used in this house and towards the master bedroom, where I know there is a large bathroom. She blinks and looks down when I flip on the bright light, and I quickly turn it off. Instead, I turn on the small light under the bathroom mirror that casts the room in a softer glow.

She went. She went to London and she found my mother and she brought her home. My job was to take care of the kids and keep them safe and let her go. And now that she's back, my job is to take care of her. She's not giving me anything, with eyes or words, but that doesn't change the fact that we have to get her ready to pull off the last phase of this - where we swoop into a hospital, collect my mother under the scrutiny of doctors and nurses and possibly other FBI agents, and go home. _Home._

I don't ask her for anything. I don't so much as utter words like "Thank you," or "I love you," because both would require replies that I'm not sure she has in her right now. And her silence would cut me like a knife.

I start with Clyde's jacket; it feels heavier than I remember it. There are still things in the pockets that I can feel weighing it down as I peel it off her body. I'll explore that later. I respectfully place it on the hook in the bathroom.

Her turtleneck is next, and that's harder. The blood that had congealed on the jacket had congealed on her sweater was fused to the skin under her right arm. I grab a washcloth and wet it, then I start soaking the material on the turtleneck until it gives. I lift it up and off her body and suck in a breath.

"You _are_ hurt," I whisper.

"I'm okay," she responds automatically.

But she's not. There's a bruise cutting across the top of her chest and little abrasions here and there, like her clavicle was pressed against something sharp. The hollow of her neck, where I so regularly buried my nose and mouth over the past couple of years is a mottle mess of purple and red blood vessels. There are abrasions around her shoulders and armpits, red marks that look like the straps of a backpack have been tattooed on her skin. There's dried blood that's sticky and hard on the inside of her right, upper arm.

I wipe that with the washcloth and discover the origin of the blood, a puncture wound worthy of stitches, but it's too late now. I reach to remove her bra instead.

Her breasts are heavy. They're breasts I've spent enough time with to know that they look like they are full of milk, which has been a rarity in the past few months; she's produced enough to feed Rory on the one or two occasions each day that she's interested, but there hasn't been engorgement. _This_ is inexplicable engorgement. As I look, a drop of milk makes its way from her nipple and down her skin, and it keeps pace with the tear that falls from my left eye and trails down my cheek.

To distract myself and keep myself from totally falling apart, I reach over and start the shower. The hot water comes quickly in this house, and steam fills the bathroom. I start on Emily's pants and underwear, and at least her legs and lower body seem unscathed. I kiss her shoulder as I guide her into the impeccable white tile. She bends her head towards the stream of water, letting the brunt of it fall on the back of her neck. I spot another bruise, a diagonal stripe across her back, and watch the clear rivulets tinge with pink when her arm gets wet.

I turn away from the view because I'm so overcome with relief and sorrow that I'm not in control of my actions. I want to grasp her and hold her and crush her in my arms and kiss her until she's breathless, but she's not open to that now, and I know it.

"I have pajamas for you. I'll go get them."

Her nod is barely perceptible through the steamy glass of the shower door.

I make my way down the stairs and go to the bags she dropped. The bag I recognize yields nothing unexpected. There's the note from Clyde with a list of names, and then there are articles of clothing I recognize. Most of the bag speaks of home - her jeans, her underwear, her shirts and sweaters and an extra bra.

The backpack, however, speaks of anything but home. IDs for all of us, with different names, and a significant amount of starter cash. I quickly close the backpack and wonder what door Emily is choosing, which bag - the one that brings us home, or the one that makes us disappear.

I pass Rossi and Chris in the kitchen, but say nothing. They don't stop me. Right now, I can only think of simple goals, and Emily in pajamas with her children is my primal need. I go to the den and quietly retrieve yoga pants, one of my old t-shirts, clean underwear and her favorite Yale sweatshirt.

When I make it back to the bathroom upstairs, I find Emily unmoved from the original position she was in when I left. She hasn't washed herself, she hasn't turned her body. She's like a statue.

"Em," I whisper, biting back even more tears.

When she still doesn't move, I strip off my clothing and step into the steamy confines of that stall. I reach for the soap and lather up my hands, and get little reaction from her when my fingers glide gently over her back. I know this body, and I know this woman. She's temporarily gone from me now, but she'll come back. I know she'll come back emotionally just like she physically has. I have to believe that.

I keep my fingers gentle on her bruised skin. I take inventory of the freckle on her shoulder and way her lower back gives way to the swell of her backside. I trace fingers over the back of her knees and down her calves. My fingers trace the top of her feet and her ankle bones. I encounter the slight stubble of her legs as my fingers make a return path up her body. When I'm standing again, I reach for her hips and turn her body to face me.

She keeps her eyes closed.

I pull the band from her ponytail and wash her hair first, with borrowed shampoo that still doesn't smell like her, but at least it's clean. Then I set to task on the wound on her arm, washing away the remainder of the blood.

I don't linger over her breasts, but kneel on the basin of the shower to wash her torso and legs.

It's when I'm there that my lips can't help themselves. I kiss the birthmark that looks like a bird that sits just below a stretch mark from Rory on her left hip. She touches my head then and it feels better than a million gestures of affection I've accumulated from her over the years. She touches my head and trails her hands down my cheek and to my neck, clasping onto the necklace.

I stay on my knees and struggle to unclasp the chain with slippery, soapy fingers. I'm finally successful and slip both her wedding and engagement ring off the chain. She holds out her left hand while I slip them on her finger. I stand abruptly and put the chain with the pendant around her neck, her birthday gift that I originally clasped on her neck so few nights ago.

She told me four days. She promised me she'd come back to me. She'd kept up her end of the bargain, but something's horribly wrong. I can see it in her eyes and her body language, and I can see it in the way her forehead doesn't relax the way I'm used to, and the way her lips can't quite curve into the natural smile I'm accustomed to.

Still, when that chain is around her neck, she pulls me towards her and hugs me. I'm reminded of the countless nights we healed each other with the touch of our skin pressed against each other. She's here. She just needs some healing.

 _She's here. She just needs some healing._

The problem is, I'm not quite sure where to start, because I don't know the details.

"What happened?" I whisper in her ear through the shower spray.

"Not yet," she says, and her voice almost sounds like her. "It will play better at the hospital in a few hours if you don't know yet."

I could play an Oscar-winning performance at the hospital if it meant she'd tell me what had happened right now, but I recognize her words as a reprieve she needs, so I don't press. I clutch her to me and nod against her shoulder. "OK," I say.

She turns off the water. She lets me help dry her with fluffy towels. She lets me untangle her hair with a brush that isn't hers, and let's me help her into clothing that reminds me of our old life.

Our old life is only four days in our history, but it feels like a millennium.

It's Emily who takes my hand and leads me out of the bathroom and through the master bedroom and down the stairs. It's Emily who walks us past Rossi and Chris and to the den. And it's Emily who guides us into the position that we once shared in Rossi's den the past Wednesday, her body next to Rory's and mine next to Leon's and our arms touching each other over our children.

Five o'clock comes and Rory's fussing starts up. I watch as Emily shifts our baby onto her side and lifts her shirt. I watch Rory latch on, like the past several days have just been some time warp that isn't real. I watch our little girl suck and drink for a few seconds before realizing that the past four days have happened. She releases Emily's nipple with a pop.

"Mama," she says in sleepy wonder. And then she's latched on again and drinking with gusto that soon gives way to utter relaxation.

Leon shifts in his sleep and opens his eyes. "Mama!" he exclaims happily. "Did you find Nana?"

I watch the lie wash over Emily's face. This is safer for our son. Telling anyone who asked that we were all together for the past few days isn't too terrible. Expecting a nine-year -old to carry the burden that his mother, who wasn't with us but was supposed to be, found his grandmother but we had to pretend she didn't, was too much to ask for.

"No," Emily says. She strokes his hair. "I love you and I tried, but no. Hotch is still looking. Everyone is looking, and we won't stop until we find her, but I needed to come home."

It's in that lie that Emily finally breaks. The entire foundation of our lives together have been built on truth, even when that truth was difficult. I know what Emily's doing and why she's doing it, and I know that in about forty-five minutes it won't matter: Hotch will call and say my mom has been found.

But it's the lie she tells to Leon and the shattering of the foundation of truth that we've built ourselves upon that finally cracks Emily's shell. Rory drinks from her breast and Leon sighs with his head against the pillow and his hand against Emily's cheek, "It's okay, Mama. You tried. We'll find her."

And Emily finally cries. The tears fall and she reaches her hand towards me and touches my cheek. "We will. We'll be okay."

The problem is, her false confession seems to speak of deeper, hidden things that she's unwilling to tell me. And her "We'll be okay," is more of a question than a statement.


	12. Chapter 12

_Aux Noctambules sat on the edge of a sketchy area of Paris. With the last call not coming until five o'clock in the morning, it was the ideal place for the reckless behavior I justified in my mind; I had the entire night to stalk my prey, if I needed it. Dressed in a short skirt and revealing top, I casually watched the customers in the establishment, using my profiling skills to zero in on the most unsavory creature._

 _The first two months that I'd played dead in Paris were filled with denial. My body healed, but my heart and head couldn't come to terms with my reality. Daily, I walked past the cafe where I'd left JJ with my fake IDs and money tucked under my arm. Every day, sometimes several times a day, I visited the location again, hoping that she was going to be there and tell me that it was over, that they'd found Doyle and I could come home. Or that she'd tell me this was all just a nightmare and it was time to wake up._

 _When that didn't happen, my denial slowly gave way to other emotions, and I threw myself headlong into the grieving process of my own death. Denial faded, bargaining surfaced,_

" _I'll be a little stronger, and this will end sooner." "I'll be a little smarter, and all of this can be undone." I was blinded to my own responsibility in this; strength and smarts were not the issue; trust was. If I'd just told Derek what was going on when he asked, I probably wouldn't be playing dead in Paris._

 _Bargaining eventually gave way to anger in a completely unplanned way, before I even recognized just how angry I was._

 _I travelled to London. I spied on Clyde, just trying to get a glimpse of someone I knew. JJ told me on the flight to Paris that Clyde was not the one who sold me out, and I desperately wanted to apologize to him. Instead, I watched his shadow move across the windows of his flat until about eleven o'clock at night when his lights finally went out._

 _I walked several blocks and ended up in a bar. I drank two shots of tequila and was chasing those down with a Guinness when a man approached me._

" _Can I buy you a drink, Love?" he asked._

 _I glanced at him and shook my head. "No, thank you. I'm meeting someone here."_

" _You've been here for awhile and it's after midnight. I don't think whomever you're waiting for is showing up." His lips were nearly touching my ear as he whispered, and his hand slowly made its way up my thigh._

 _I stood from the barstool. "Then I guess I should be leaving myself." I threw some money on the bar and didn't give him a parting glance._

 _He caught up with me about two blocks later and grabbed my arm, hauling me into an alley, throwing me to the ground. The gravel biting into my knees and hands only fueled a rage in me I didn't even know was festering there. And I let loose that rage on the man. I imagine I broke a couple of ribs, I definitely broke his nose, and he wouldn't be getting it up any time soon to pursue other women._

 _That night when I got back to my hotel, after I showered, was the best sleep I'd had since JJ left me in Paris._

 _After that, I sought vengeance against men, men who liked to press their advantage with women, and proof that I was strong enough. After my two months of denial, I spent the next three months playing my little game, coming out a winner every time. I crisscrossed into London, Paris and Rome with my fake IDs, found bars that were fit for my surveillance, and let nature take its course._

 _I looked for strong men, men who thought they could easily overpower me. I wasn't always successful in finding the right person, but I was often enough. Sometimes I let them buy me a drink, sometimes I danced seductively with them. Other times, I only needed to sit there and give them a little smile occasionally. When I knew I had them hooked, I left whatever bar I was in, usually through a side entrance and into an alley. Sometimes no one followed me; many times they did. I knew how to lock into the right person._

 _As I broke the nose, kneed the groin and in other ways beat the crap out of those men who attempted to force themselves on me in the back alleys of different areas in Europe, my anger let loose. I proved to myself that I was strong enough, and every man I beat up was Ian Doyle. I convinced myself that my activity was was right, that I was saving some anonymous woman who couldn't fend herself off from an undesirable fate._

 _It was a full-proof plan - no man was going to go to the hospital and admit that he'd tried to corner a woman in an alley and that woman had beat the shit out of him._

 _And it was those nights when I lured my prey and executed my wrath that I could actually sleep._

 _I'd been at it for about three months when I'd ended up at Aux Noctambules. That was the riskiest place I'd ever attempted such a thing. While there were "massage" parlors close to bar, and otherwise untoward occupants of the neighborhood, that place had an eclectic mix of patronage - from locals to traveling yuppies seeking cheap drinks in the middle of the night to smarmy assholes.  
_

 _One such asshole caught my eye. He would be the largest man I'd ever taken on. I'd been watching him for about thirty minutes when I saw him slip some powder into the glass of a woman he was trying to hit on. I stood quickly from my table, stumbled like I was drunk towards them, tripping and pushing into the woman, tipping her glass over._

" _I'm so sorry," I slurred in French._

 _The woman looked pissed. She got up quickly and excused herself to bathroom to clean up. I smiled at the man, apologizing again, and offered to replace the drink._

 _He looked me up and down. "How about a dance instead?" he asked while staring at my cleavage._

 _I nodded at him and smiled. The man engulfed me, and while he pressed himself against me and ground his pelvis into me, I started imagining what would happen later. I imagined digging my fingers into his denim covered crotch, getting in a few rib kicks, and possibly breaking his nose._

 _The woman glared angrily at us when she returned from the bathroom and left the bar in a huff. She had no clue she'd just likely been saved from a horrific night. The man's hands traveled up the back of my thighs, and I moaned. Then, acting shy, I pulled away. "I have to go," I whispered. "I'm sorry. I can't do this. I'm married," I said embarrassingly._

 _He reached for me, his fingers almost painful on my wrist, and I pulled away again. "No," I moaned, "I can't."_

" _You, there. You let go of her," the bartender called out, a baseball bat firmly in his hand. The man released me, and I looked down, my cheeks tinged sufficiently pink; the man probably thought it was from embarrassment, but it was really my adrenaline pumping, preparing me for the fight._

 _I grabbed my coat from the stool where I'd left it and staggered out the side entrance to exit the bar, convincingly playing at my fake inebriated state. It was nearly four o'clock in the morning, and the bakery across the street had its lights on, the morning crew already there getting ready for the day. I knew I needed to slip into a darker alley if I wanted to get what I'd come there for. My fingers were twitching, my muscles jumping, my heart pumping at full force. I knew he would follow me._

 _I turned into a dark side alley, the stale smell of garbage pungent in the air, and heard footsteps behind me. I smirked to myself. "Get ready, fucker," I thought._

 _I pretended to roll my ankle. I stumbled. I let the footsteps get close enough that I could spin and get in a good kick to the ribs, and I did just that, spinning, expecting to see the large man from the club. My kick died in me mid-spin, though, and I buckled to the ground before I made contact, looking up into the face not of the bastard I'd just danced with, but that of Aaron Hotchner._

" _What the fuck are you doing?" he hissed._

 _I was speechless for a few seconds. After over four months entirely alone, I didn't even know how to speak to someone who knew me. I cleared my throat and stood tall. "I could ask the same of you," I responded coolly, hiding my shame and sorrow, breathing out my rage, letting go of the idea of a good ass-kicking, followed by a few hours of content sleep. Instead, hope surged in me - was he there to bring me home?_

 _That idea was quickly dashed._

" _I've been put on temporary assignment in the Middle East. I'm on my way there now. I tracked your fake IDs and found out you were staying in a hotel near here. I showed up just as you were leaving tonight. I followed and watched. Is this what you're doing now? Luring assholes out of bars and beating them?"_

 _His direct words stung me. Yes, it's what I'd been doing, but to have someone who knew me, who I cared about and trusted, saying the words out loud made it seem far less vigilant and far more pathetic._

 _I tossed my head back in defiance while I pulled my thin trench coat more firmly around my scantily-clad body. "There's not a whole lot else to do here," I said icily. "Why are you being sent to the Middle East?"_

" _Politics," he responded stiffly._

 _I wanted to melt. I wanted to cry. There he was, tangible proof of a life that I'd been trying to forget I had, but I had no time for letting my walls down, and no energy for tears. "They're pissed that I died," I said. "So am I."_

" _Emily…" he sighed._

 _I shook my head at him, trying to keep an emotional distance. "It's Mudge. That's the name on my ID. Rachel Mudge. Emily isn't here anymore. And you're putting me in danger by tracking me. You're not even supposed to know my identities."_

 _I think what I'll remember most in that moment is not my shame, but Hotch's tears, how they filled his eyes and he tried to rapidly blink them away while I clenched my jaw. "I just stopped here on my way because I wanted to let you know that Morgan is looking for Doyle. We'll find him. Where's Declan?"_

 _I shook my head again. "I don't know," I lied. It wasn't that I didn't trust Hotch; it was just that I put nothing past Doyle, including anything Hotch would communicate via any phone to Morgan. And it was in that moment that I realized I was seething, and recognized how my anger at myself had been erroneously transferred to Hotch._

 _Hotch opened his mouth to say something just as a shadow moved past the alley. "Excuse me," I whispered._

 _It was the thug from the bar. I walked toward the edge of the alley. "Looking for me?" I called out.  
_

 _The man grinned lecherously and stepped towards me. My fist crashed into the large man's throat, effectively cutting off his air. Less than thirty seconds later, he was groaning on the ground, one arm clutched around his ribs and the other hand protectively held over his groin. "You'll remember this the next time you slip something into a woman's drink? Won't you?" I hissed in his ear._

 _I turned to look at Hotch, smiling in grim satisfaction, "We all do what we need to do in order to survive," I said._

" _Emily," he tried again._

" _Don't get dead in the Middle East. It's not what it's cracked up to be," I hissed as I turned my back on him and walked away. I was barely controlling my tears at that point, but I held on until I got back to my hotel room. Then I collapsed onto the bed and sobbed._

 _Hotch and his connection to my old life was the caveat that spurred me forth into the next part of the grief cycle - depression. I stayed holed up in my hotel room for nearly two weeks, where I cried and barely ate._

 _Acceptance came thirteen days after I saw Hotch. I couldn't keep living how I had been living. I piled together all of the slutty clothing I'd accumulated over the course of the previous few months and threw them down the trash chute. I bought different clothing, flowered summery blouses and skirts and slacks. I stayed away from bars. I prepared myself to remain anonymous and hidden forever. I started contemplating finding a job.  
_

 _Then I got the call from Tom Kohler - the only person besides Hotch and JJ who knew I was alive - that Declan was in danger, and I flew home. I called Hotch before I boarded my plane and he briefed me on the situation. Then, in a hesitant voice, he asked. "Still beating up men in back alleys?"_

 _I knew he was really asking where my head was at, and what kind of Emily was going to walk back into the BAU. "No," I whispered into the phone. "I gave that up a couple of months ago."_

" _Good," he said._

 _In my mind, I passed off the seven months in hiding as a grieving process that I no longer needed to think about because it wasn't real; it was over. As far as I knew, Hotch never told anyone about that brief encounter we had in Paris or what he knew I was up to while I was gone. And he never personally asked me about that time, or about how many men._

 _The answer is twenty-three._

 _In three months, in shithole bars spread across several countries, I'd beaten the crap out of twenty-three men._

There are four pumpkins on our porch, set off against the light gray paint on our railing and brick siding near our front door. Just eight days ago, on the Sunday morning after everyone came over to celebrate my birthday, we'd buckled Rory into her red, plastic wagon and walked a mile to a little pumpkin patch near our house.

She was wearing a brown sweater that had fall leaves knitted into the pattern that day. Her curly hair was wild and beautiful, and she laughed while running through the pumpkins on wobbly legs while Leon chased her. We drank hot apple cider before Derek took off his shoes to get into a bounce house with the kids. I joined them after seeing the fun they were having. I remember how Derek sat up against the red plastic of one corner of the bounce house, the air whirring and blowing, keeping it inflated, while I held hands with Leon and Rory. We bounced lightly and laughed as Rory became delirious with giggles.

"I love our life," Derek said to me over our laughter and the noise.

I glanced at him and grinned widely, "Me,too."

We walked back home that day without a care in the world, Rory back in the wagon surrounded by pumpkins, Derek pulling it with his free hand in mine, Leon running ahead and stomping on fallen leaves.

I can't believe that was only eight days ago. There's not a carefree feeling left in me now.

After a morning at the hospital and then at headquarters where Fran gave her official statement, we're finally home. Our plan went off without a hitch with no one pressing Fran for information than her original story.

The official paperwork would read that Patrick Joyce returned Fran to the US and then disappeared. Hotch would have to contact Interpol and various international police units. Patrick Joyce would likely end up on several "Most Wanted" lists. And when the mess was cleaned up at the house in England and DNA was run, there would be more questions that Fran wouldn't have the answers to because she was either drugged or locked in a basement, according to her statement.

Physically, JJ and I were in the clear. Emotionally, I was barely hanging on.

Hotch drove us home from Headquarters. My father rode in the passenger seat. Derek and I were in the middle row, a sleeping Rory in her car seat between us. Fran and Leon were in the back row of the Suburban, our son happy with his hand in Fran's and his head resting on her shoulder. Aside from breaking down into tears when he first saw Fran in the hospital and hugging her, he hadn't said much.

We'd all been relatively quiet in this final act of deception, playing our parts, but not talking unless asked a direct question.

It's 3:15 in the afternoon when we pull into our driveway and I take in the pumpkins on our front porch. I can see all the neighborhood kids in their fall jackets walking home from school. Leon smiles when he sees his friends. I can't imagine ever letting him walk to and from school again, let alone setting him loose in the neighborhood and letting him play. Maybe Derek's thoughts are keeping pace with mine, because he reaches over Rory's car seat and squeezes my shoulder.

We get out of the car and I pull Rory out of her seat. She keeps sleeping, her head resting on my shoulder. Ainsley, the little girl who lives next door, comes running up to Leon.

"You're back!" she says happily. "Daddy said your house was broken into. That's scary. He said you went to Chicago for a few days."

Leon nods. "Yes, we visited my Aunt Desiree and Aunt Sarah."

The lie rolls easily out his mouth and I feel myself inwardly cringe. Desiree and Sarah have no idea that Fran was even missing.

"Can you play?" asks Ainsley.

Leon glances at me and then at Fran, who is clearly exhausted. "Not right now. I have to make up the school work that I missed. Maybe tomorrow?"

Ainsley smiles and nods. "OK. And we can walk to school together in the morning."

Again, Leon glances at me. He nods his head at Ainsley not knowing what else to do. I have every intention of making that walk to school with them. The danger has passed, but everything still feels almost suffocatingly unsafe to me.

Derek and Hotch pull our bags out of the car and we head into the house. I watch as Derek disarms our alarm and sets the bags in the living room. Our house is like it always is - warm and inviting. It surprises me that it still feels that way.

I watch my father gently guide Fran to the couch, his arm around her waist. When she's seated, she looks at me and Rory. "Can I?" she asks.

I smile and bring Rory to her. "Of course."

I nestle our sleeping baby in the security of Fran's arms and watch as she begins to cry, kissing Rory's forehead. I touch Fran's head and quickly turn, biting back my own tears.

Hotch inclines his head towards the den. He wants the real story now, as does Derek. I can feel my heart hammering in my chest and I want to buy myself a little more time.

"Hang on a second," I say. "I want to check something out first. Leon, can you keep Nana and Grandpa company?"

Leon nods and goes to sit next to my father on the couch, his eyes curious, wondering what I'm up to.

Derek and Hotch follow me to the kitchen and to the door that leads to our backyard. "There was a picture at the house in England. From Derek's birthday party. I just need to see."

I don't know why this has been weighing on my mind. It's over. They're all dead. But they'd been so close, at least since June. So close, just waiting for the moment they could break Patrick out of jail so that they had a pilot.

Hotch and Derek follow me down the path that leads to the dock, but I hang a left before I hit the wooden planks. I creep carefully between the bramble and the water's edge and make my way towards the angle I think that picture was taken from, and it's not hard to find at all, now that I'm looking. A couple of candy wrappers, dirt that's been clearly more disturbed than the surrounding ground, a couple of broken branches. Crouched down, they would have been easily hidden by bushes from both the house and the dock.

I look towards our home. From here, I can see our decking, our backyard, the french doors that lead into our living room, and I have a perfect view of Leon's treehouse. How often had he and Henry and his other friends been right there in our backyard, just ten or fifteen feet away from this place? I feel a chill run down my back.

"I want to clear all these bushes," I say to Derek softly.

I feel his hand on the back of my neck and fight the urge to pull away from him. "I'll call someone tomorrow."

Tomorrow, when we're both supposed to head back to work like we'd really just taken a few days after our house was broken into. There's no way in hell we're both going to be thirty minutes away in DC. It doesn't matter to me that Penelope said she's come over and help with Rory during the day since Fran won't be up for it. It doesn't matter to me that I'm only scheduled for a four hour translation block at the State Department and then I can come back home. At the moment I can't think of a single other language I speak; all I can see is us both in DC and something going wrong.

But I nod at Derek and smile slightly, turning my body and heading towards the house. I pull my jacket more tightly around me and sit on the steps of our back porch. I don't want to talk about this in the house. Derek sits next to me, linking his fingers with mine, and Hotch stands before both of us. I spill out the story to Hotch and Derek from the moment JJ found me at the airport until the moment we got on the plane back home.

I'm prepared to tell them about that baby. I know I need to. But when I get to that part of the story, what I'd told Fran is what comes out of my mouth. _The floor gave after the bombs exploded. Marietta and the baby fell."_

It's the first lie I've told Derek since I found him over two years ago and it settles thickly over me, making my stomach churn and my eyes sting. I squeeze his hand and he releases my fingers and wraps his arms around me. "Thank you," he whispers against my neck.

I glance at Hotch from the safety of Derek's arms and catch him looking at me in a way I haven't seen since he found me in a dark alley in Paris five years ago; the look of a man whose stunned to know what I'm capable of when I'm feeling wronged, angry and scared. He looks like he's worried about me, and that's the last thing I want right now. I do a decent job of faking a smile to reassure him.

I've already exhausted my vigilante justice in this situation. There won't be men in dark alleys where I viciously hunger to prove my strength and unleash my anger. All that's inside me is regret.

 _If I'd just been a little bit stronger, I could have saved that baby._

I'd said that to myself the whole flight home, and perhaps it was partially true. But I know myself well enough to know that my strength is just barely scratching the surface of the issues that feel insurmountable inside me right now.

Later that night, when we get Fran settled in the guest room and I implore my father to stay in the den with us until we can get an alarm on his cabin, after the kids are settled in their own beds for the first time in days, I brace myself for what's to come.

When Derek slides into bed behind me and presses his chest against my back, I try to relax so he won't feel my tension. When he reaches his hand under the t-shirt I'm wearing and snakes his fingers gently over my skin and between my breasts so they rest over my heart, I try to take calming breaths.

"Do you want to talk?" he asks.

I shake my head and bite back tears. "I'm so tired. We both need sleep."

His lips against my neck are the same soft lips that have sent me off to sleep in a similar fashion countless times before, but I can't find comfort in them.

"I love you," I whisper. Because I do and always will, but I'm scared because I don't know if he can love me the same as he did before if I tell him the truth - how I let go of that little sweater and watched for just a second while the red curly hair of a toddler blew in the air before his body fell to the burning ground below.

"I love you, too, Emily. Things will start feeling normal again."

I nod and bite my lip, swallowing past the the lump in my throat.

I wait for several minutes until his breathing evens out, and then I wait several more for him to fall into a deep sleep. I test the waters by moving his arm that's under my t-shirt. When he doesn't wake, I slip quietly out of the bed. I check on the kids and peek in on Fran. I check the alarm panel and then every window and door in the house.

Finally, I go to the room on the first floor that holds Derek's exercise equipment. I start with push-ups, feeling like if I can just get my upper body strength back to the condition it was two years before, when I'd carried both JJ and Clyde from a burning house, I might eventually be able to close my eyes and stop seeing Adrian's body falling from my hand.


	13. Chapter 13

_A/N - Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I am thankful today that we're going elsewhere for dinner so that I had a little time to write. It's been so crazy insane at work lately, that I come home completely fried and unable to muster even a few words on a page. But I'm hoping to have ample time the next few days. Peace and love. Be kind, be hopeful, be thankful. xoxo_

* * *

 _I met Vanessa the semester after I blew out my knee on the football field. Having been extended my scholarship even though I could no longer play, I decided to throw myself headlong into my studies. I felt like a stranger in the dorm that was largely occupied by the football team, and found myself spending more time in the library and far less time with the constant partying that was going on now that the football season was over._

 _I revisited the fiction books I'd read when I was younger in the confines of small corners in Northwestern's main library. All those books I'd read as an escape when I was younger were even better to me the second or third time reading them, when I was away from Carl Buford._

 _It was a cold Friday in February when Vanessa rounded the corner of one of the book shelves and found me sitting on the floor completely absorbed in The Catcher in the Rye._

" _Didn't you read that in high school?" she asked._

 _I looked up to see an attractive woman with startling green eyes that were partially hidden by smudged glasses. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail and her body was hidden by layers of baggy clothing. She was also weighed down by about a hundred pounds of large books._

 _I blinked at her and saw her question wasn't meant meanly, more as a joke._

" _Twice, actually," I replied._

 _She fidgeted a bit. "This is usually where I spend my Friday nights."_

" _Me, too. Lately."_

 _She shook her head and smiled slightly. She had a beautiful smile. "No, I mean here. As in right here. This is kind of my corner. I hate studying at the tables. Too many distractions."_

" _Oh," I said, moving to stand up. She looked grateful and bent to relieve herself of the burden of books in her arms._

 _I started to walk away and she whispered, "Do you read quietly?"_

 _I turned and raised an eyebrow at her. "I think so."_

 _She sighed and settled herself on the floor. "Then you can stay here, if you want."_

 _For whatever reason, I sat back down on the floor next to her. I opened my book again and started reading, and she grabbed the book from the top of her stack, pulled a notebook out of her bag, and started reading and taking notes. After about thirty minutes, I reached for one of her books, and then another. They were all criminal law books._

" _My father is a civil rights attorney, and I intend to be one as well. My father graduated second in his class here. I intend to graduate first," she said with a smile._

 _I stared at her and stuck out my hand. "I'm Derek. And I have no idea what I want to do with my life."_

 _She laughed and shook my hand. "Vanessa. And if my father could have stuck a JD at the end of my name on my birth certificate without my mother killing him, he would have."_

 _Neither of us did much reading for the remainder of the night. We talked. Vanessa was twenty-four years old and had three semesters to go before she got her JD. I was a child to her, several months shy of twenty years old, a football player who could no longer play football, and a liberal arts major at the time. She told me about her family, about her father who grew up in Alabama and was the black sheep of his family for all his liberal thoughts, and how she'd grown up in New York, a childhood spent at sit-ins, rallies and protests. I told her about my father, and mentioned I'd probably join the police academy after I graduated._

 _For the rest of that winter and into the spring, we met at the library most evenings. I helped her study and found I was quite good at memorizing facts and case studies. And in between, we had deep, meaningful conversations. It was Vanessa who talked to me about declaring a major that would at least give me options if the police force didn't work out. It was Vanessa who suggested I get out of the dorm I was currently living in and move someplace where I felt more comfortable; who understood when I told her it wasn't the same anymore now that I knew I could no longer be on the team._

 _The last day of the semester, we went to her small studio apartment to celebrate the fact that I'd officially changed my undergraduate major to criminal justice. She made dinner and opened a bottle of wine. She poured me a glass and laughed when she said she was technically breaking the law by giving me alcohol. I'd never had wine before, and I sipped the cabernet slowly. Vanessa on the other hand, whom I'd never seen drink, downed several glasses and opened a second bottle._

" _I've never done this before," she said rather sloppily when we were done with dinner._

" _What?" I asked._

" _Gotten drunk," she said with a giggle. "All I've ever done my whole life is study."_

 _I never had, either. Being drunk dulls the senses, and I was always scared I'd say something while under the influence of alcohol that I'd regret, or that I'd let my guard down. Even at all the college parties I'd attended in the past, I only sipped a single beer during the night, though I often pretended I was drunk along with everyone else._

 _The alcohol hit Vanessa hard. She ended up getting sick and came out of her bathroom in nothing but her bra and underwear when she finished throwing up. She could barely walk and she stumbled towards the ground. I grabbed her before she fell completely and carried her to her bed. I got her under the covers and brought her some water, then I fished around her bathroom and found some ibuprofen. I sat next to her while she took the pills and I coaxed two glasses of water into her before she finally passed out._

 _I didn't want to leave her. She was my friend, probably the best friend I'd ever had in my life up until that point, and I was worried about her getting sick again and needing help. So I found a blanket in her closet and laid down on the floor next to her bed. Eventually, I drifted off to sleep._

 _The next morning I woke up and saw Vanessa staring at me from her bed._

" _How do you feel?" I asked._

" _Like something died in my mouth," she whispered._

 _I grinned. "How's your head?"_

" _Actually, it feels fine." She looked down at her blanket and then back at me. "I knew I'd be safe with you. I don't know why I drank so much, but the reason I drank at all was because I knew I didn't have anything to worry about with you, that you wouldn't take advantage of me, that you'd just be my friend."_

 _I smiled at her again. "Of course."_

" _Can you hand me my robe?" she asked. "It's on the back of the bathroom door."_

 _I stood from my bed on the floor and went to the bathroom, retrieved her robe, and turned my body while she stood and put it on. I heard her walk the few steps to the bathroom and bent to pick up my blanket. I heard water running and the toilet flush. I was just putting the blanket back in the closet when Vanessa stepped out of the bathroom._

 _She surprised me by stepping in front of me. She pushed gently on my chest and walked me backwards until my legs hit the edge of her bed. Then she pushed a little harder and I sat down. I watched in stunned silence as she dropped her robe. I had studiously tried not to pay attention the night before, but underneath the baggy sweaters she typically wore was a stunningly gorgeous body._

 _She put a knee up on the bed and straddled my lap. She smelled like soap and toothpaste, and her lips were a whisper against mine when she first kissed me._

" _I've never done this before, either," she whispered shyly._

 _I wasn't sure I was the right person for the responsibility of being her first, and I felt my nerves kick up into high gear. But she trusted me, and she was about as close as I'd come to trusting anybody._

 _She was the first person I was ever with who taught me that maybe there was more to sex than just fucking. That maybe when you felt something for someone, a whole different world could open to you._

 _I wouldn't say I was in love with her. I was still three weeks shy of twenty years old at the time and I wouldn't have known love back then if it was thrown right in my face. And she was several years my senior, and completely focused on her studies. But there was a mutual trust there, and a connection I'd never experienced before._

 _Two days after that, I started summer school classes, and she left to get on a plane to LA where she was interning in a law firm for the summer. It was the summer of 1992, just six weeks past the LA riots, and she was going to work with the people in the community of Compton, helping sort out charges and build cases for a public defender of those involved in the riots._

 _I didn't want her to go. I grew up in a neighborhood that was barely one step above Compton, and I knew what racial unrest looked like first hand. She was a petite white woman with auburn hair that would stick out like a sore thumb. But I kept those thoughts to myself. She was strong and determined and trying to talk her out of her summer internship would have ended up with her leaving anyway, but pissed off at me._

 _We promised to write each other and call when we could. When she was stepping into the cab that would take her to the airport, she turned to look at me. "I'll see you in the library the first day of school in the fall."_

" _Absolutely," I responded with a smile._

" _Derek. Thank you. You're the best friend I've ever had."_

 _For some reason, I felt myself biting back tears. I hadn't cried since I was fifteen years old, the night Carl raped me for the first time, and I swore I'd never cry again. The feeling was surprising and uncomfortable, but I swallowed past the lump in my throat and smiled at her._

" _Me, too," I said._

 _And then she was gone._

 _Three weeks later, a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting struck Vanessa in the head. She died instantly. She was the second person I cared about taken from me by a bullet._

 _I gave myself a weekend to grieve her death, and then I did the only thing I could do for her, for her memory - I worked my tail off in college. I went on to get the JD she never got a chance to finish. I graduated first in my class in her honor._

 _It was a warm June evening, well over twenty years after that one night with Vanessa that I officially turned in my resignation at the FBI. I'd start working part time for the Department of Justice the following Monday, finally putting to use the JD degree I received as a way to remember my first true friend._

 _I remember that I was out on the back porch of our home in Alexandria, just enjoying the scenery, watching the water from the Potomac ripple in the distance, waiting for Chris to return with the boat and a catch of fish that we'd cook for dinner. Leon was off playing with friends and my mother was in her apartment._

 _Emily found me out there. She'd gotten home from work and changed into sweats and a t-shirt before joining me on the back porch. Though I was lost in my thoughts and feeling both unsettled and excited about the path of my career, I immediately focused on her - the gentle smile on her face, the slight swell of her stomach that had really started popping out in the past couple of weeks._

 _She came and sat gently on my lap, leaning her back against my chest._

" _How are you doing?" she asked softly after she kissed my cheek._

 _I settled my hand over her stomach, under the waistband of her sweats. I thought about how I was feeling and then felt the slight fluttering of our baby against my fingers. The unsettled emotion left me instantly. That was what I'd left the FBI for - Emily, Leon and our baby who was on the way._

" _I'm looking forward to the future," I said._

 _I felt Emily's smile more than saw it, the way the skin of her cheek moved against mine. "Me, too."_

" _I'm also thinking about my past. I've never told you why I got my JD. I've never told anyone the real story."_

 _Emily turned in my arms so she could look at my face. "Why did you?"_

 _So I told her. For the first time, from start to finish, I told her about Vanessa. That young, studious, open woman was the reason I was sitting there with Emily on the back deck of a beautiful home in Virginia as much as anything or anyone else had led us to that point._

 _When I was done, Emily kissed the few tears that were on my cheeks. She ran her fingers over the skin on my neck and pressed her forehead to mine. "I'm sorry you lost a friend like that. You're a beautiful man," she whispered. "I trust you with my heart and my life."_

 _Turning fully in my lap, with her chest against mine and our baby pressed between us, she kissed me. "Nothing is ever going to take me away from you, Derek."_

* * *

Emily's picking her nails again. She stops when she sees me watching her, but she's constantly digging into her digits. It's a nervous habit of hers that I haven't seen since she worked with me at the BAU. She's also not working; she's essentially quit since there's no leave of absence for a part-time contract employee who's only been with the State Department for a couple of months.

She's picking her nails, and she's barely eating anything, and she's exercising like she's obsessed.

The first night we were home, I didn't wake up when she left the bed. I did wake up enough when she climbed back into the bed, wet from the shower and smelling like the soap she always uses.

"Why did you shower in the middle of the night?" I asked her.

"I couldn't sleep," she whispered back.

But I've woken up on the subsequent nights when she's escaped my arms and our bed. She's slaying demons she's not talking to me about in our home gym, lifting weights and doing push-ups and running faster and longer than I've ever seen her run on the treadmill.

The morning after we got home, I found her in Leon's bedroom. He was dressed and ready for school and Emily was putting a watch on his arm. "My friend Gil set this up for me," she told our son. "Look."

And she showed Leon her phone and a little red dot flashing. "I'll be able to see where you are, and if you press this button here, you can talk to me and I can hear you. So if you're scared or worried or just want to check in, just press this button. I won't be able to talk back to you, but if I touch here on my phone, the light on the watch will flash red, and you'll know I've heard you."

Leon looked at the watch on his wrist. "It's like an Apple Watch," he whispered.

Emily grinned slightly. "Kind of, but it looks like a regular watch, so no one will ever know."

Leon looked at the watch again then stared at Emily's face for several seconds. "You found Nana, didn't you, Mama? She came back right after you did. I think I know you found her, but no one else can know that. Just like no one else can know that you weren't with us in a safe house. You got the bad guys, didn't you?"

His voice was curious and breathy and sure.

"No one's going to hurt you or take you, Leon," was Emily's non-answer to all his questions. "This is just to help make you feel safe."

Leon at looked at her face and nodded. He wrapped his arms around her neck. "I'm not scared. I spent my whole life being scared, but I'm not scared when I'm with you and Papa."

Emily hugged him back and kissed his cheek. "Good. Now go on downstairs and have your breakfast. Nana and Grandpa are up and in the kitchen with Rory."

I took a step into Rory's room so Leon wouldn't see me as he exited his bedroom, and then stepped back into his room once he hit the stairs. I found Emily sitting at his desk chair crying. She turned when she heard me step in the room, and shook her head slowly at me. "I never wanted them to fear anything," she whispered.

Then she stood and brushed the tears from her face. She smiled at me. "It's okay now. No one else is coming after us."

She reached out and straightened my tie before resting her hands against my chest.

"Do you really believe that? Because if you don't, we can disappear. I just want us happy and for you to feel safe, Em. I saw the fake IDs in the bag you brought back from London. Whatever you want, Emily. I mean that."

She kissed me and then shook her head. "I don't want to disappear. This is our home. I don't know if your mother or my dad would come with us, and even if that did, where does that leave the rest of our family? If someone wanted to hurt us and we were gone, they'd go after JJ or Hotch or anyone else on the team, and we'd come running back. And we can't all disappear together."

I nodded at the truth in her words and kissed her back. And then I hugged her to me like leaving for an eight hour work day was tantamount to leaving on an eight month business trip. "You're not going to work?" I asked.

"I can't," was what she finally managed to whisper back.

Back then, I thought it was just for that day or week, while we all recovered from the upheaval in our lives and my mother's body healed. But it wasn't.

Four nights after we were home, when Emily went to get out of the bed and head down to our home gym, I didn't let her go. She thought I was sleeping, but I wasn't. I clutched my arm around her and implored her to stay, and she stiffly settled back against me. Then she flipped her body over so she was facing me and kissed me.

Emily and I have had some pretty wild exploits with sex over the past couple of years, but those physical expressions, no matter how crazy things might have gotten, where always making love. It took me until after to realize that night that there wasn't that deeper connection there. Emily was fucking me, and that was it. She was using me as nothing more than exercise apparatus, keeping herself walled away from the emotional side of things, working up a sweat and accelerated heartbeat until she could pass out from exhaustion. She settled her body next to mine when she was finished, and drifted off to sleep, while I silently cried with her in my arms.

Back then, I thought her world had been rocked by my mother being taken and she was feeling unsure. I thought maybe she was feeling remorse for slitting the throat of a secured man, for the fact that a toddler died in an explosion even when she didn't cause that explosion. And then I thought that maybe Patrick Joyce becoming repentant and merciful was what was causing her to be so distant from me.

But I don't think that's it either, though that's what she tells me when I ask her, when she's not pissed off that I'm asking.

October has rolled into November and I'm starting to stack up a pile of nights where Emily won't talk to me about what's bothering her. Sometimes I still catch glimpses of the old her, like when she's interacting with Leon and Rory, but whenever there's a childless moment, she seems like she's a million miles away.

I've talked to JJ, and her story matches what Emily told me and Hotch. I've spoken with my mother, who, for her ordeal, is recovering far faster and better than Emily is. I've spoken to Chris who insists that there's something Emily's not talking about.

We're all a little sad and broken that we're not getting our lives back to where they were, but we're all holding out hope that it's just going to take time after something like what happened.

It's the first Monday in November now, and I arrive home from work to Emily banging around the kitchen.

"What's wrong?" I ask gently.

"My dad's back in his cabin. The alarm was installed this morning. And your mother has decided that she's healed enough to go back to her apartment. Leon's visiting with her up there now," Emily says icily.

"That's a good thing, Em," I whisper. "It means they're not scared and want to get back to our old lives."

She turns towards me, a pan in her hand, and waves it wildly as she hisses, "We're never getting our old lives back."

The words stun me. Here I thought we were just taking the necessary time to all heal in our own ways, and Emily's telling me that that's not going to happen.

"They'll be a little different. The motion sensors and cameras around the property are being installed tomorrow, though. We'll have more safety, and it will start to come back, Emily. This home, our life. It will be good again. I know what you did was terrible, but you did it for the right reasons - to get my mother back, and to make sure we were all safe. And you'll see that. It will just take time."

Emily shakes her head and lets out a mirthless laugh. "It's all different now. You don't understand. You weren't paying enough attention."

Now I'm totally confused. All I've been doing was paying attention, waiting for her talk. And I'm pissed because I feel like she's throwing this back on me when it's she who is holding back. I snap.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean? You've been brooding since you got back and won't tell me a damn thing. You fuck yourself into exhaustion on my dick every night like you're not even really in bed with me, and on the nights you don't do that, you exercise until you practically pass out. Don't tell me I haven't been paying attention. I've been paying attention every day, watching you move further away from me!"

I watch as her face crumples and tears fill her eyes. She looks down but doesn't respond. Just then, Rory cries out for Emily from her crib, where she's woken from her late afternoon nap.

Emily puts the pan down to go get her and doesn't lift her eyes to meet mine. So I reach out and touch her shoulder gently. "I'm sorry," I whisper. "It's just that you promised me that there was nothing that could take you away from me, and I feel like you're getting further away everyday."

She glances at me and touches my hand where it rests on her shoulder. "I love you. I'm not going anywhere, Derek," she whispers.

I believe her, I do. She means it, physically. Her body will be present in this home forever, but I'm not sure how to find her heart again.

"Tell me, Emily," I implore.

She shakes her head and squeezes my fingers. "I have told you. You're right. It'll just take time."

With that, she lets go and moves away from me, heading towards the stairs to get Rory.

* * *

XXXXXXXXXXX

Last year, when Rory was just an infant, Derek and I spent hours in the backyard, raking leaves and throwing them at each other, rolling around in crunchy piles of fallen foliage and laughing. This year, we hired the same company who pulled the bushes from the water's edge to clean up our backyard.

Halloween's over. I did a pretty passable job that night playing my part as doting mother while we took Leon and Rory out around the neighborhood to trick or treat. I even managed to have a few, light conversations with the neighbors.

I'm not sleeping enough, my stomach lurches and rolls every time I contemplate food or even smell it. I'm barely hanging on. I know it and Derek knows it - hell, everyone who really knows me knows it. I know I just need to tell him, that I should tell him, but every day that goes by where the words get stuck in my throat feel like an abyss I can't cross over. I should go back to therapy, but this isn't something I can tell a therapist either. Gil calls every few days to check in and let me know Holly seems to be getting better and stronger, that she's started taking correspondence courses. Maybe I could talk to Gil, but I don't do that either.

I've been holding out for time. That time will heal the wounds and I'll wake up one morning and that little toddler I let go of, and the break-in, and Fran disappearing will just be a distant memory like so many other parts of my past that I've done a good job of forgetting and letting go of.

This morning, Marcus Klaus called me. He told me in a questioning tone about a house in England where the bodies of three people were found amidst the wreckage of an explosion and fire. He told me that everything in the house was pretty much burned beyond recognition, besides three charred bodies. That of a woman, who had DNA that wasn't in the system anywhere, that of a man whose DNA matched some unsolved murders in Queens a couple years back that Derek was investigating before he was kidnapped, and that of a child whose DNA matched the woman's and that of Adrian Stancu's.

I told him Fran's story - the same one that's on the official records. I speculated that perhaps this was where Patrick Joyce had been; where they'd maybe held Fran.

Marcus contemplated that with silence and breathing for several seconds, and I knew on some level that he knew I was probably in England a few weeks back. But I trusted him not to press me, and he didn't. Instead, he dropped another bombshell. "Adrian Stancu's dead."

"How?" I asked, shocked.

"A man named Thomas Brisbane killed him in prison. It's interesting. I know Thomas. Clyde did, too. He was part of the Royal Marines with us, along with a man named Gil that I haven't heard from in decades. Thomas left the service and became a murderer for hire. He was caught in Italy about a decade ago and sentenced to prison. Last week, he was transferred seemingly randomly to the same prison as Adrian, and a few days later, Adrian was murdered. Thomas snapped his neck. It's quite a coincidence, isn't it?" Marcus implored.

"Yes," I whispered.

"I thought so. You know, Emily, I'm in my kitchen right now. I'm staring at your Christmas card from last year that's still on the side of my refrigerator. I'm looking at you with your family, and I'm thinking that if I were in your shoes, I'd do anything in the world to protect my family. I _would_ do anything to protect my family."

"Yes," I whispered again.

"Thank you for not involving me, though know that I would help if you ever needed it," Marcus said softly before he hung up.

Feeling both relieved and thankful, I set down my phone. Knowing Adrian was dead gave me a boost of safety I hadn't felt since I'd been home. Even if there were potentially other victims of Adrian's who had come to be his followers, there wouldn't be a whole lot of wind in those sails now that Adrian was dead.

I didn't dare call Gil to thank him, even though I knew he was probably the one who orchestrated the murder. Instead, I did the first normal thing I'd done since my birthday - I looked at Fran, who was playing with blocks with Rory. "I have a doctor's appointment later this morning. I was going to postpone, but I should probably keep it."

Fran smiled, clearly relieved. I'd been stuck to her like glue since we'd be home, and I sensed that she'd been waiting for this - for this glimpse of normalcy.

I didn't think much of my yearly visit with Dr. Craig. I told her that I thought I was starting to become premenopausal or that my hormones must be a little off, because in mid-October, even though Rory wasn't breastfeeding much at all anymore, my milk supply surged and then receded again a little over a week later. I figured she'd take that in, I'd get a pap smear, have a breast exam, and then head back home.

Instead, when Dr. Craig was palpating my uterus, a strange expression flitted across her face and was quickly gone. When she pushed two gloved fingers inside me and pressed down on my abdomen, the same expression crossed her face.

"What?" I asked, worried. _Wouldn't that just be some poetic justice for me to have some sort of medical problem now,_ I thought.

She shook her head, "I can't feel your IUD string."

I watched in a combination of panic and horror and awe as she wheeled a small cart towards my stirruped legs. I was very familiar with the transvaginal ultrasound device.

"It's not totally unusual," Dr. Craig said. "Depending on where you're at in your cycle. You say you've not experienced any menstrual bleeding?"

I shook my head, still apprehensive. "You know I don't have periods with my IUD."

Dr. Craig nodded. "Let's see if we can find it. It's possible it's lodged into your uterus."

I was watching her face. I know a liar when I see one, and she was keeping something from me. She turned the monitor towards herself and inserted the wand inside me. I felt it twisting and turning and watched Dr. Craig's profile, the stunned expression in her eyes.

"Do you check for the string every month?"

 _No._ Aside from the first year I switched to an IUD from birth control pills, which was around the time I started at the BAU, I never checked. Sure, I felt it sometimes when I masturbated, back when my nights were long and lonely. And Derek had mentioned nonchalantly that he'd felt it a couple of times, but that had been awhile ago.

I shook my head.

Dr. Craig turned to look at me fully, a mixture of uncertainty. "Well, you lost it at least about eight weeks ago, but it may have been gone for longer."

"What?" I whispered, finally realizing that my potential medical condition was not a potential tumor or an IUD lodged where it shouldn't have been.

I was thinking about a small purple cottage and blinding white sand and a blue ocean as far as the eyes could see. I was thinking about crazy, endless sex in the Bahamas. Sex in the jacuzzi tub in our cottage, and even one night in the ocean. Drunk sex and sober sex and nights where there was nothing but Derek inside me, both of us reveling in our love. All of his fluid inside me. I could almost see then how I could go to the bathroom and lose my IUD and never even notice or pay attention, flushing that small little device that was the difference between pregnancy in my late forties and not right down the toilet.

I watched in horror and fascination as Dr. Craig turned the monitor towards me. There was not just my uterus, but a very definable baby, now that I knew what a baby at this stage of the game looked like. And the pulsing flutter of a heartbeat.

I didn't know I was already crying until I spoke. "They fall out?" I screeched somewhere between a whine and a wail.

Dr. Craig's face turned sympathetic. "They can, Emily. It's rare, but they can."

I wiped the tears from my cheeks and just stared at that image. How different this was from the last time, when there was nothing but joy and euphoria. "I'm forty-seven years old," I wailed. _I don't deserve another baby after what I did,_ my inner voice whispered.

Dr. Craig patted my leg and handed me a tissue. "Rory's a beautiful, healthy little girl. There's no reason to believe that this baby won't be as well. But it's entirely your choice Emily. I know you took precaution to prevent pregnancy. I'm here to support you no matter what."

What the fuck was she saying? I could barely breathe, let alone think.

"You're far enough along for the fetal DNA test. Do you want to do that now?" Dr. Craig asked.

I nodded, feeling like my head was detached from my body. Yes, that would be good. I could keep this secret for a week while I found out if the baby was healthy.

That was my initial plan, and I realized in that moment that secrets were a lot like lies - once you keep a secret or tell a lie, the next one is easier to keep or tell. Or so I thought.

I took the blood test. I drove home, though I couldn't tell you a detail about the path I took to get there. I watched in horror as my father and Fran took their belongings back to their respective homes on this property. I rocked Rory with tears in my eyes as I put her down for her afternoon nap, and I hugged Leon when he got home from school.

By the time Derek returned from work, I had left sadness and worry behind and replaced it with frustration and fear - two emotions that looked a lot like anger. How could this happen? How could this baby even have a chance to be healthy at my age? How could we possibly take on another child when we couldn't even ensure the safety of the two children we already had? How is it possible that in all our times together Derek didn't even notice that that wiry string wasn't inside me anymore?

I was pregnant before I left for London and didn't know it. All those many days since I'd been home of swallowing past my gag reflex at the smell of eggs and meat cooking were not me being torn up about what had happened in England, but about the baby growing inside me.

It's erroneous, how we assign blame when we're backed into a corner, and that's how I felt when Derek came home from work - desperate and backed into a corner. I snapped at him. He snapped at me, speaking harsher to me than he ever had before, and I was almost relieved by it. I realized that's what I wanted on some level, for him to get angry with me.

We muddled through dinner that night with the kids and Fran and my father, and just like before Fran was taken from us, after dinner, both my father and Fran left for their homes. And it was just the four of us again.

I vowed that I wouldn't say anything to Derek until I got the results of the fetal DNA test.

Tonight, I wait for him to fall asleep. Though I probably should be taking it easy, our home gym is the only thought on my mind. For the first time since we started living together since over two years ago, Derek's arms are not wrapped tightly around me. He only has a tentative hand on my hip.

When I think his breathing is even enough, I try to slip out of bed, but his fingers clasp me. "Please don't leave tonight," he whispers. "I'm sorry I said what I did. I just want you to talk to me, to talk through it with me, and I don't know what to do when you won't."

I roll over to face him, and then I roll my body on top of his. "It's okay. I'm sorry I snapped at you, too. It just all so much." That's not a lie - I'm drowning in the enormity of what's happening right now, things he doesn't even know about.

I strip off my pajamas, and then I strip off his. But he doesn't let me have the upper hand tonight; he doesn't let me be distant. I'm straddling him, about to screw myself into an oblivion of sleep when he grabs my thighs and flips us over. Immediately, my heart starts hammering in my chest. I feel his lips on my face and neck and his body surrounding mine, and then he does something he's never done before - he clasps my wrists over my head, holding them so firmly that there's not a chance I can pull away. The moonlight through our curtains is enough for me to be able to see his eyes, and I quickly shut mine.

"Emily," he whispers.

Slowly, fear filling me, I open my eyes again to look at him.

"Come back to me," he breathes out as he enters me slowly.

I thought I was the vulnerable one here, but looking at him, at all the fear and love in his face, I realize that he's the one who's even more scared than I am. He's the vulnerable one, really believing that leaving him is an option, that he might not ever get me back.

I wasn't sure I could totally come back to him the same way as before, but looking at his face and feeling a few tears drip from his eyes onto my cheeks, I know that I have to try.

I have two secrets inside me right now, and I'm not sure which one to let loose first. But I have to give this man that means the world to me something to hold onto.

I pull on my wrists and he lets go of me.

I put my arms around his back and hold him tightly to me.

His hips are barely moving and the warmth of his body like a blanket over me is more comforting than anything I've ever felt. I almost let myself forget what this was like.

"I'm pregnant," I whisper in his ear.


	14. Chapter 14

" _It's hotter than hell in here," Emily said breathlessly._

" _The air conditioner stopped running," I mumbled, trying to gain control of my heart rate and breathing. I gingerly stood from the bed and went to the small window unit in the cottage. I heard Emily laugh._

" _What?" I asked._

" _You have a hundred dollar bill stuck to your ass."_

 _I laughed and reached back, pulling the paper from my sweaty skin. Emily's blackjack winnings were scattered all over the bed and floor._

 _I fiddled with the dials on the air conditioner. "Shit. I think this is broken."_

 _Opening the window, I discovered the air outside gave no relief - it was August in the Bahamas and the warm humidity in the air at three o'clock in the morning was not all that different than it was at three o'clock in the afternoon._

" _Here," Emily said._

 _I turned and caught the robe she tossed at me. She already had my t-shirt pulled over her body, the hem settling at the top of her thighs._

" _What are we doing?" I asked_

" _Cooling off. Come on," she said with a grin, heading towards the door. "I found a place when I was out snorkeling."_

 _I tied the belt on the robe and followed her outside the cottage. We weren't exactly on a private beach as six other rental cottages faced the water along with ours. But it was quiet in the middle of the night. My white t-shirt she was wearing glowed in the moonlight and I followed her to the water's edge and then to the right where there was a copse of palm trees._

" _Where are we going?" I whispered into the night._

" _Almost there," she said._

 _Fifty yards later, we came to a clearing. The cabins were hidden from view on the left, and to my right, I could make out the lights of hotels off in the distance, but there was nothing and nobody here that could see us - no cottages, no homes. It was a very small private beach, a scrap of sand, and then water._

 _I watched her as she pulled the t-shirt off her body. "There's barely any coral around here. We should be fine. Come on." She gave me an impish grin before turning to dive into the shallow, calm water._

 _I was no fool. My wife was naked in the warm waters of the Bahamas, and I wasn't about to not follow her. I shed my robe and dove in after her. She laughed and splashed me gently when I reached her. She leaned her back against my chest, our feet planted in the squishy sand, her head on my shoulder and turned so her lips pressed against my neck. "Thank you," she said. "For finding this place. For bringing me here. For loving me."_

 _There was a half moon that night, but it was enough to see by. I watched over her shoulder as the rivulets of sea water ran over her breasts. Her ivory skin and my darker skin were a perfectly orchestrated dance against each other, out there in the water where it felt like we were the only two people left in the world. I kissed her neck and her cheek and her right arm looped up and back so my head was held to the warm skin between her ear and shoulder._

" _Do you know the legend of the selkie?" she asked._

 _I shook my head. I had a vague recollection of the term, but nothing more. She used my arms to pull my body tightly to hers and I held on. "It's an old legend, Irish in its roots, though there are many countries who have similar fables and folklore. They say the male human seeks out the selkie, a seal-like creature who is always drifting and swimming. When the male finds her, he takes her seal skin away and she becomes a human with him, to marry him and love him."_

 _I pressed the palm of one hand against her stomach and the other over her heart. "Is she happy, when she's taken from the water?"_

" _Sometimes not. There are many stories about selkie females who marry the man who took her seal skin away and she has children with him, but then later sought her skin so she could return to the sea. But I like to believe that when the right man finds her, she's happy. She doesn't want to go back to the water and drift, she just wants to stay with him."_

 _I turned her in my arms at that point and kissed her. "I'm glad I found you."_

 _Her wet hands trailed over the contours of face. "Me, too." She wrapped her arms and legs around me as the water lapped at our waists. "You know, there are male selkies, too. They shed their skin and take a human form. They're said to be masterful at the art of seduction."_

 _With that, she ground her pelvis against me, and I felt myself getting hard. I smirked. "Who's seducing whom here?" I asked._

 _I held her to me as she laughed. The pictures of perfection in our life where plentiful. It was perfect when we all laughed around a dinner table together - Leon and Rory and my mother and her father with us. And it was perfect when the team was over. It was perfection when I watched her nurse and rock Rory to sleep each night, and when we read with Leon before bed. And this was perfect, too - just the two of us out here in what was only steps away from civilization, but felt like the middle of nowhere._

 _We kissed out there in the water for several minutes, our hands trailing over each other, our breath catching here and there. With her legs wrapped around me, I pushed inside her. I expected for her to stay upright in the water, with her legs around my waist and her arms wrapped around my neck, but she released me with a brief kiss and let herself fall back into the water, so her torso was floating before me and she was looking up at the stars in the sky._

 _I stilled the movement of my pelvis. "What if two selkies find each other? Two drifters who come together. Do they stay together in the water?"_

 _I looked at her while she contemplated me, her body glowing in the moonlight and the water dancing on her skin._

" _I've never heard of a story like that, but maybe it's out there." She tilted her head slightly to catch my eyes. "Or maybe we're writing that story right now. Two selkies who find each other and shed their skins to live as humans with their children and their family."_

 _I pulled her upper body back up to me and turned us around, taking a few steps towards the beach. I got just far enough so I could lay her down with her head was above the gently lapping waves and I could sink my knees into the sand. "Is she happy?"_

 _Her fingers were on my cheeks and her thumbs trailed over my lips. "Happier than any definition of the word, even though she's about to get sand in unmentionable places."_

 _I chuckled and flipped our bodies over so she was on top._

 _What a sight she was that night above me, with the moonlight and water reflecting on her skin, with her body bent over me and her forehead pressed against mine while she moved above me and the warm, salty water covered me from the neck down._

I'll never know for sure, but I like to believe that was the night Emily lost her IUD. Sometime between winning big at the blackjack tables at Atlantis and our time in the water, it had dislodged itself, or I'd dislodged it, and it washed away in the waters on that beach there unbeknownst to us, when we were declaring our happiness in the quiet confines moonlit sand and sea.

Something let loose in Emily the moment she whispered, "I'm pregnant," in my ear. A deluge of tears and her clinging to me instead of pushing me away, and I welcomed it. To say I felt shocked would be an understatement. Shock paled in comparison to what I felt. We were both past the point of mid-forties, and I thought with everything in me that Leon and Rory were it.

Before questions could spill past my lips about how and when, I thought about all the times I told myself to to slow down and enjoy watching Emily with Rory, believing that every single moment of Rory's infancy would be the last that we experienced. I thought about all the nights where I was too tired to give Emily and our baby my full attention, and how I felt guilty about that. And now I felt the opportunity of a second chance to remember it all - every beautiful detail.

Though I'd intended to make love to Emily that night and not let her be distant, I pulled out of her instantly. I kissed her forehead and her lips and moved my body down the silky skin between her chin and abdomen.

The tears in my life have been large torrential bursts and abrupt stops when I've declared inside me that it was enough. But this was different. There wasn't a burst of tears, but a slow, steady drip that naturally flowed from my body over the skin of Emily's stomach. "What?" I asked. "What?" over and over while her hands clasped my head to her skin and I felt her body shake with her own tears.

"I don't know," she cried. "My IUD fell out. I didn't know. I took the fetal DNA test today. We should know in a week if everything's okay, but I'll have to retest in a couple of weeks because it's early. I'm about eight weeks pregnant. I saw the heartbeat."

 _The heartbeat._

I kept one hand clasped to Emily's hip and my face against her stomach, but my other traveled up her skin to rest over her heart.

"Do you want this?" I asked, scared and my voice thick with tears.

I had to ask. It was the first time I'd wished I had a head full of hair, so she could dig her fingers into it and press my face to her skin and cling onto it and never let go. I didn't have that. Her fingers with their torn up nails rested gently against the bare skin of my scalp and I had free movement if I wanted it. But there was no way I was moving from where I was and the several seconds of silence nearly broke my heart.

"This baby is you and me. Of course," Emily finally breathed.

Emily's thighs were warm against my rib cage and her sparse, trimmed pubic hair was pressed somewhere around my neck, my hands clasped her hips and my cheek rested over her belly button. "Our baby," I whispered.

Maybe two kids under the age of two should have scared the crap out of me with Emily like she was right now, but it didn't. In that moment, I thought that a baby was the one certainty that could bring her back to me.

"Hi baby," I whispered over and over while pressing my lips to the silkiness of her stomach and her hands rested gently on my head and she cried.

We fell into an exhausted sleep like that at some point that evening and woke up in the same position the next morning, smiling softly at each other when the alarm went off.

I've done some sleuthing on the internet. There's an infinitesimally small chance that a woman can have an IUD fall out. There's an even smaller percentage of women who are forty-seven years old who conceive naturally. In fact, one doctor quoted online that in twenty-six years of practice he'd never seen a woman over the age of forty-six conceive naturally. And then there's the small percent chance that a woman Emily's age won't miscarry.

I'm sure Reid could extrapolate the numbers for me, but I won't ask him because right now we're keeping this pregnancy under wraps. And I'm not sure I need his fractional percentage either, or that I want it. I'm smart enough to know that the odds of us actually having a healthy baby sometime in the spring is about on par with winning the national lottery.

I'm thinking of buying a ticket, even if we don't need the money.

But she's come back to me since then, in small ways. She's not so distant when the kids aren't around. Her arms loop around me when I'm doing the dishes, her lips on my skin are her choosing, not my insistence.

She's still picking at her nails, but she's taking care of herself in other ways. She's not leaving our bed to exercise in the middle of the night, though I know she's walking a lot during the day. She can't stand the smell of eggs or meat cooking, so I get downstairs before my mother shows up in the morning and start a big pot of oatmeal that I happily watch Emily stuff away.

Her hand is in mine before I clasp onto her fingers, and her smile is more frequent. And this morning, Dr. Craig called before I left for work. Leon had already left with my mom for his walk to school. We're all operating under the guise now that Rory wants to tag along, so Leon is never left without an adult at least a few steps behind him; my mom was following him on this walk to school with his friends this morning.

And Dr. Craig called.

And Emily answered and put the phone on speaker.

"Everything looks amazing," Dr. Craig said. "Fantastic. Do you want to know the gender?"

This time, it was me who wanted to be surprised, more than Emily, but Emily looked at me and nodded with tears in her eyes, so I nodded back.

"Yes," I hushed out over the speaker in Emily's phone.

I thought I'd be totally caught up in the words that came from Dr. Craig's mouth, but I wasn't and couldn't be. Because Emily grabbed her phone as soon as Dr. Craig started speaking and turned her body. She sank down against our kitchen cupboards and clasped her phone.

"How can this even be real?" she whispered.

I took the phone from her and spoke softly into the speaker. "We'll call you back," I said to Dr. Craig before disconnecting and placing the phone on the floor.

I straddled Emily's legs and placed my hands on her cheeks. "You look at me, Emily Morgan. What happened with the break in and my mom was a fluke. That's it. It happened and you saved us all and it's over. _This_ is not a fluke. This baby is meant to be. This baby was meant to be before my mom was taken. This baby is meant to be now. Because we deserve this crazy, beautiful life. This baby is NOT a fluke. This is real. It's you and me and everything that's right in this world."

She shook her head. "I don't deserve this."

"How can you even say that?" I asked.

She shook her head and put her arms around me and sobbed into my shoulder, but didn't say anything more, and hasn't said anything more about it. But she's not crying and she's never uttered another word about not deserving this baby in the two weeks since Dr. Craig's phone call.

It's the Monday before Thanksgiving now. Two years ago, we went to Dr. Craig's office and had HIV tests on this day.

Today, Dr. Craig sees us during the lunch hour again. Emily went in for another blood draw last week, and things are still looking good. She's a little over eleven weeks pregnant.

Today, Emily looked at me in Dr. Craig's exam room, a cloth gown tied in the front and a sheet over her lap. She touched my face. She said, "Only you," and smiled. "These types of miracles could only happen with you."

Today, I saw our baby's. I saw minuscule arms and legs moving on the monitor. I heard and saw the rushed fluttering of a tiny, healthy heart beating.

Today I saw our son for the first time.

I clutched Emily's fingers and kissed her cheek and whispered over and over again, "You deserve this more than anyone."

* * *

It's cold today, but there's not a cloud in the sky. The trees have lost all their leaves and the grass is brown and it's supposed to snow on Sunday. Without the bushes that used to line the water's edge and with the bare trees, I can see the house from here, the windows lit up and glowing softly in the late afternoon.

I'm bundled in a jacket and sweater and I had to rummage around in the basement this morning and pull out some of my smaller maternity pants that I'd packed away to donate but had never actually gotten around to doing so. They say you start showing earlier with your second baby, and that certainly seems to be true for me. This morning, I couldn't button my regular jeans.

From the boat, I can see figures moving the house. Leon is busy making place cards for the dining room table, and Sarah and Desiree are helping Fran with the turkey and food. My father is napping in his cabin and Rory is napping in her crib. People will be here in an hour for Thanksgiving, and I couldn't stand the smell of the turkey cooking. I excused myself for a quick walk, but I really headed down to the boat. I've seen Derek looking this way from the back door in the living room a few times; he knows where I am.

The water is gentle and the boat is barely rocking, which is good. I don't think my stomach could handle the motion right now.

It's been nearly four weeks since I found out I was pregnant, and I still can't believe it. I watch my breath puff in the air when I breathe out for several minutes before closing my eyes. We've decided we'll tell people on Sunday, when I've officially hit that magical twelve week mark. Only it's not so magical when you're forty-seven years old. It's a great accomplishment, but second trimester miscarriages at my age are incredibly common.

"Em?" JJ's voice calls out.

I open my eyes and see my friend on the dock. I've barely seen her since we've been back from London, avoiding get-togethers and declining evening visits because I wasn't feeling well, had a headache, or any other excuse. I know Leon's been missing Henry, which is a large reason that I didn't cancel on having everyone over for Thanksgiving. That, and the fact that I couldn't stand the thought of people being more worried about me.

"Welcome to Maryland," I say to JJ.

"What?" she asks with a smile as she gets on the boat.

I sit up more on the bench seat. "This dock is technically an easement. Where land meets water, Virginia ends and Maryland begins."

"Huh," JJ says as she sits down next to my feet where they're resting on the seat. "Why are you freezing your ass off out here?"

"It's not that cold. I needed some air," I reply. "You're early."

"A little. Henry was dying to see Leon, so I brought him early. Will will bring the rugrat later, after his nap." She looks at my face and then her eyes travel down my body. She reaches a hand out and touches my knee. "Em," she whispers.

"What?" I ask. Something about her voice causes my heart to start racing.

"I miss you. I know it's just as important to you to work through things on your own as it is to me, but I don't like this. I've barely seen you in weeks, and Derek's worried about you. We all are."

"I'm okay." My reply is automatic and without emotion.

I feel her lean her body towards me so she's resting against my raised legs. "No you're not. I saw you, Emily."

I finally meet her eyes and notice the tears in them. I watch her blink rapidly. "What do you mean?" I ask.

"I ran back to the door at the house after the bombs exploded and saw your arm and hand clutching the piano leg. I yelled at you to hold on. Then Gil asked if there was a parachute in the helicopter, and when I nodded, he and Patrick went off running. I knew we wouldn't be able to reach you from the front door because the porch was so unstable, so I ran to the side of the house, looking for a window. You were dangling there, clutching the baby's sweater. I looked away when I heard Gil and Patrick running back, and when I turned back around, your hand was empty and you were pulling yourself up onto the floor by the piano."

I stand abruptly from my seat, and JJ tips slightly before righting herself.

"Who did you tell?"

I can't believe those are my first words, or that my tone is so harsh.

"No one, Emily. I didn't tell anyone. I know what it feels like to not be able to talk about something painful. I've been waiting for you to talk about it, but you're not. So I wanted to let you know that you could talk about it with me, because I already know. You let him go to save yourself. I'm thankful you did. You deserved to come home, Em. This is where you belong."

I clench my jaw. "I wouldn't have let you go. I wouldn't have let Rory or Leon or Derek go. I would have found a way. I gave up on that little baby. You wouldn't have let him go."

JJ stands up and faces me, "To save myself in a situation like that, I think I would have. I would have wanted to get home to my family just like you did. I've thought about this a lot, Emily, and you probably could have used your strength to fling him up onto the floor, but you would have fallen in the process. And we wouldn't have been able to get an unconscious child out of a situation like that. You both would have died, Emily. You didn't die. You came home."

I can feel the contents of my light lunch churning in my stomach. I'd been thinking for weeks that all I wanted some comforting words of absolution all this time, but I can't believe them.

"I wasn't strong enough," I mumble before I feel my stomach lurch and the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I consumed a couple of hours ago makes a reappearance over the side of the boat and into the Potomac.

JJ's hand on the back of my head is gentle. "You're the strongest person I know, Em. You did what you had to do. You did everything you could. I love you. You need to talk to Derek."

"He'd never have let that little boy go," I whisper as I wipe my mouth. I keep my knees up on the bench and rest my forehead against the railing of the boat, keeping my eyes from JJ. But she's not letting me hide away. Her arms are around me.

"He'll understand," she says. "He loves you unconditionally, Emily."

I stand and move away from her arms. "I'm pregnant," I say. "I'm pregnant and I shouldn't be pregnant. There's no conceivable medical probability that I'd get pregnant at my age, and I am. And it's a boy. I was pregnant before we left for London, but I can't help thinking that if I carry this pregnancy to term, and this baby comes into the world, all I'm going to be thinking about is the little boy I let fall to his death. And if I tell Derek, I'm worried that's all he's going to be thinking about, too."

I go into the cabin of the boat and find a bottle of water. I swish some in my mouth and spit down the sink, then splash some on my face.

"Emily," JJ says softly from the doorway. "You need to talk to him."

I nod. I need to end this conversation or I'm never going to make it through Thanksgiving dinner.

"I know. But it's Thanksgiving, so come on. They're probably wondering where we are," I say while managing to plaster a slight smile on my face.

I walk and get off the boat, and JJ follows. She walks a few paces behind me and her voice is a loving whisper in the cold air, getting at the crux of the issue far better than I'd been willing to admit to myself since I'd been home.

"You can't only trust his love when things are perfect, Emily."


	15. Chapter 15

_A/N - Sorry! It's been a horribly long, nearly unforgivable delay. Life (mostly work) got nuts and I just didn't have any creativity left in me on evenings and weekends. And then, in between there, I took my son to LA for Christmas and he got to meet Paget (very happy boy...pic in my profile). :) It's difficult to write about her as Emily after talking to her as herself, at least for awhile. But I'm back now! Hopefully I'll get another chapter up in a couple of days._

* * *

 _The first time with Emily, right after JJ and Will's wedding, was frantic, both of us moving at warp speed; me because I didn't want her to put a stop to anything, and her because she didn't want to give herself the time to think._

 _We only slowed down when it was over, when my heaving chest was pressed tightly to her sweat-slicked back. I marveled at the slope of her shoulder in the moonlight. I ran my fingers over the silkiness of her skin. I wanted to crawl inside her in that moment and keep her from going to London._

 _Her body was relaxed against mine, like she had no intention of kicking me out of her bed that night. I could have laid my head down on her pillow and held her to me for one beautiful night, but when our breathing had slowed and I was thinking again, I couldn't stop the thoughts in my mind from coming out._

 _I opened my mouth to tell that I loved her, that I think I had loved her for a long time. My desperate mouth had a mind of its own, though. "Don't go to London," I whispered into the velvety skin of her shoulder._

 _She stiffened in my arms and shifted her body so she was lying on her back and facing me. She opened her mouth to speak but I cut her off. I trailed my fingers down the plane of her torso and circled the tips over her hipbones. I kissed her breast. "Stay. You're willing to leave the BAU, but you could do that and stay in DC."_

 _I met her eyes then and watched as a veil fell over them, as her walls went back up and the locks around her emotions and her heart were thrown. She shook her head slightly._

 _"I think you and me could work, Emily," I tried again, one last-ditch effort._

 _She pulled her body away from me, moving towards the edge of the bed. I watched myself lose her completely, right before my eyes. I couldn't believe the woman I was looking at, who was so rigid and closed off, had been the same one who only moments before had been so open and soft._

 _I used to wonder what our paths would have looked like, and whether or not they would have converged together earlier or never at all, if I had just shut my eyes and held her that night without saying anything at all._

It's December, and it's colder in Los Angeles right now than it is in DC. A strange anomaly. Emily texted me a picture yesterday of Leon and Rory in the backyard, running around in t-shirts, while I was bundled three layers deep in downtown LA.

I shouldn't be here. When I took the job at the Department of Justice, I knew that there would be occasional cases that required me to travel, but I didn't think it would be this soon. I couldn't believe it last week when I went into work and my supervisor came to me with a case that required immediate attention in Los Angeles, and said, "You're it."

That it was a sex trafficking case made it even more brutal. But this was why I had hired, and there were four female victims that had been found locked in a house as sex slaves for at least eleven years, since they were teenagers. The neighbors near the house had smelled gas and called 911 and the fire department had shown up. When no one answered the door, they busted in. They found a leaky stove and four women chained to bolts in the ground. They didn't find the unsubs.

My boss wanted me in LA because one of those women went missing from DC when she was fourteen years old, and they thought perhaps maybe I could get them all to open up and point us in the direction of the people who had taken and held them for so many years.

I almost told him I couldn't do it right then and there, but I drove home to talk to Emily about it in person instead. And the thing that sent me packing, aside from her logic that my job with my medical benefits were going to be necessary throughout her pregnancy, was that there was relief in her eyes.

Like she needed a break from me, from us, and the tension we tried to pretend wasn't swirling around us.

After four days here, I'd gotten enough information from the women to track down the family – two brothers and a sister – who had taken them. They were found in a hotel room right on the Mexico border yesterday afternoon.

I'll fly home later this afternoon. I hope those bastards plead guilty so that I don't have to prepare and come back out here for a trial. As soon as the plane that brought me here lifted off the ground in DC, I knew the last place I should be was anywhere besides home.

Each night away from Emily has been a knife in my gut. I'm that sorry, desperate fool again, the one lying beside her in bed wondering what the hell to say. She's both there and gone, beside me in bed every night. She smiles softly when I run my hands over her very slightly protruding stomach, but most nights when I'm two breaths away from sleep, I feel her tense up in my arms. I've been opting not to say anything at all and just hold her until she finally falls asleep.

It feels like she's slipping right through my fingers.

The streets of LA are a marvel as I pound the pavement on my run. There are people who clearly can't believe this weather, like if they just keep coming outside in their tank tops and shorts, it will magically be in the 70s again. And then there are the people who dress like they're in the middle of Minnesota in winter, whose west coast bodies can't handle forty degrees and they need down and wool and hats and earmuffs.

My breath visible puffs out in front of me and my feet hit the sidewalk and I finally give myself time to think about home. Emily and I are a lot a like in so many ways. When something injures us, jars our emotions or wounds our hearts, we tuck it away and find extrinsic means to deal with it.

The problem is, Emily doesn't have the same extrinsic means at her disposal anymore. She doesn't have a job where she can throw every ounce of her energy into working a case, and she can't slug out whatever she's feeling in a gym; she's been regimented to walking and light yoga only as a form of exercise for the duration of her pregnancy. She's got a house and two kids and my mother and her father that she's sitting around waiting to protect from anything or anyone that might harm them. That's a lot of angst and energy stewing inside her day after day, with no real outlet.

 _OK, Derek. If you're a lot alike, what would cause you to behave like she's behaving?_

That's the million dollar question. I mentally go through her statement from the night she rescued my mom again as I turn a corner and head back towards my hotel. It hits me like a ton of bricks as I near my destination, colliding in my mind with such force that it causes me to stop running abruptly and latch my hand on a lamppost to keep myself upright.

I never saw it before, because I didn't believe she'd ever lie to me again.

There's only one thing I can think of that would make Emily act like she's acting right now. Because we _are_ a lot alike, and if either one of us ever had a hand in failing an innocent victim it was nearly impossible for us to face.

I close my eyes and imagine the scene in that house in England, imagine it like the story Emily told Hotch and me.

She grabbed the toddler and was running towards the door of that house. Marietta grabbed her leg and tripped her, and then the bombs went off and the floor disappeared. The baby would have been under Emily; he wouldn't have fallen when the floor gave way under Marietta, who was closer to the basement.

Emily reached for the piano leg with one hand before the floor beneath her gave way. And I'm pretty sure she had a sleeping little boy in her other arm at some point. She made it out of that house; he didn't.

* * *

I thought I wanted Derek to go for a few days, that I'd be able to breathe a little more freely, but it's been absolutely agonizing to be separated from him. I've spent four restless nights in bed, waking and pushing back towards Derek's side like his body will be there, before I remember that he's gone.

It was strange in the house without him, with the Christmas decorations up and the unseasonably warm weather outside. It was strange because we have a gun in our home again.

That was what I did the first day Derek was gone. I left Rory with Fran, dropped Leon at school, and went to a gun shop. I still have a valid permit in Virginia, so the purchase was easy. I bought a top-of-the-line lock box and secured the gun away on the top shelf of our bedroom closet, underneath a few of my sweaters.

When Derek had left the BAU, we agreed we didn't want guns in our home. A gun locked away would have done nothing to prevent what occurred in this house in October, but I still thought I'd feel better having that hardware within reach. I was wrong. I woke to several nightmares that first night without Derek – nightmares about the kids getting their hands on the gun and accidentally shooting each other.

I gave up on sleep at about five o'clock in the morning. I got the gun out of its box and held that cool metal in my hand. I moved to our bedroom window and alternated between gazing out at the Potomac in the murky light and staring at the gun in my hand, its heavy presence feeling foreign in my fingers, like a gun and I no longer went together.

 _What the fuck are you doing Emily?_ I asked myself in that moment. I really didn't know.

My thoughts were distracted when I noticed movement at my father's cabin.

Fran. Fran kissing my father softly in his doorway, and then moving quietly away, down the pathway toward her apartment over the garage.

Derek had told me that he thought my father and Fran were getting closer, but neither of us had considered it to this extent. The sight of her kissing my father shocked me motionless for several minutes. Then I smiled softly and crawled back into bed. I clutched Derek's pillow in one arm and the gun in my other hand and cried until Rory's babbling roused me from bed a little later.

My breast milk completely dried up the last week in November. Rory made the transition easily, far more easily than I did, drinking a cup of regular milk in the mornings while I snuggled her, and just letting me rock her and sing to her at bedtime.

Life was moving on, despite what happened in October. Fran and my father were moving forward and our kids were growing. There was a baby inside me reminding me every day that life and love continue their trajectory even when I felt like everything just needed to stop and be dialed back a few months; wishing that I could go back in time and change just one thing so Fran was never taken.

I felt stuck on the outskirts of all these very evident signs of life in my own family; stuck, and I knew it was my own doing. Every night since Thanksgiving, I'd try to find my resolve before Derek fell asleep and tell him the truth about what had happened, but I could never make the words come out. Now I had the added worry that whatever reaction Derek had to the fact that I let that baby go to save myself would be masked by his concern for my pregnancy.

Yesterday, I took the sailboat out with my father. It was warm enough for a t-shirt and jeans out on the water. He gave me a watery smile when I pulled off my sweatshirt and he looked at the little bump there that was apparent. He reached his hand out and placed it on my stomach. "It's not good for the baby, for you to hold so much inside, Emily."

I turned and busied myself with the sails. "I don't know what you're talking about. This baby is absolutely fine, as unbelievable as it is, and I'm getting better. It just took a little time."

"Better at faking it, Lune, is not really better at all," he said softly.

I turned to face him, anger flaring inside me. I decided to change the topic. "I saw Fran leaving your cabin the other morning. How long has that been going on?"

He looked down and then back up at me, smiling shyly. "Since August. I have no idea what she sees in an old goat like me, but it's been good. For both of us."

My anger disappeared at the innocent, happy look on his face and I reached my hand out to touch his shoulder. "I'm glad. You don't have to sneak around, you know."

The boat slowed to a near stop and my father went to release the anchor. I pulled out our fishing supplies. "You don't have to hide from any of us either, Emily. There's nothing you can do or say to make any one of us love you any less. Derek would go to the ends of the world for you. Talk to him."

I blinked rapidly, willing my tears away. My eyes burned, but stayed dry. I felt my father's arms move around me and the brush of his lips on my cheek. He moved away from me and winked. "The sneaking around is fun. Makes me feel like a teenager again."

He chuckled and I laughed. He grabbed his fishing rod and let the matter drop. It was right on the tip of my tongue to tell him the truth, but I owed that truth to Derek first.

My father's words weighed heavily on my mind. I was nearly levitating in happiness throughout my entire pregnancy with Rory, and she was practically born with a smile on her face, content and relaxed. I can only imagine how our son will be if I continue throughout this pregnancy with this level of stress and fear that I'm trying to pretend isn't there. And there's no way I can let it go without talking to Derek.

 _Just tell him._ It's the only thought that's been on my mind today as I got the kids ready in the morning, walked Leon to school, and played with Rory. _Just tell him,_ I said to myself as I drove back to the gun shop to return the gun. _Just tell him,_ I said to myself as I kissed our children goodnight tonight.

It's a little before ten o'clock when I hear the sound of Derek's keys in the front door. Tears prick my eyes and a shiver runs down my spine when I see him in our foyer. He's dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, and he drops his garment bag carrying his suits and his carry-on right there on the floor. He stares at me and looks like he's on the verge of tears himself.

 _Just tell him, Emily._

But I don't have to.

He takes three long strides towards me, where I stand next to our Christmas tree, and sinks to his knees before me. His arms wrap around my waist and he presses his lips to my stomach. "You let him go. The baby. You let him go so you could save yourself and come home to us."

I feel him pulling on my shaking legs, and the tears fall down my cheeks as I sink to the ground and onto his lap. He chases my tears with his lips. He kisses my neck and my face. He's sloppy and frantic in his attempt to get to my skin, his hands tugging at the buttons of my pajama top. I feel one pop off, but when the shirt is open, he quickly drags his shirt off himself. He's saying something, but I don't hear it for a long time, the pounding of my pulse, the rush of blood in my ears, and pure relief making me dizzy and deaf.

"Thank you." It finally registers. He's saying thank you between the kisses on my shoulders and neck, his arms tight around me. "Thank you for making that choice. I'm sorry you had to – so sorry – but you came home to us, Emily. I wouldn't want to live this life without you."

"JJ told you?" I ask against his neck.

He shakes his head and takes my face in his hands, so that I'm looking at him. "I figured it out."

"You would have saved him," I whimper.

He shakes his head. "I would have come home to you, no matter what. Tell me what happened."

I close my eyes and let him move my body, and I tell him. I tell him about how the wool on Adrian's sweater felt in my fingers as I started letting go of it. I tell him about the heat and the smoke and the thought that if I didn't let him go, we were both going to fall. I tell him about seeing the red of that baby's hair in the burning rubble beneath me for one fraction of a second before I looked away and climbed up on a miraculous scrap of flooring that was still standing.

My voice is barely above a whisper, but he hears me. When I'm done, I'm laying on the carpet to the right of the Christmas tree, completely naked. When I open my eyes, there are twinkling white lights on the tree reflecting above Derek's head, his eyes looking into mine, his body just as naked as mine.

"I'm sorry I lied to you," I breathe out.

He shakes his head and smiles softly at me. "I'm sorry it took me two months to figure it out."

I run my fingers over his face, needing to feel the sincerity I see in his eyes. I can't quite believe it's real. "You would have let him go to get home to me?" I ask, and the tears fill my eyes again.

And Derek nods. He tips his head to kiss my chest between my breasts and keeps his lips over my heart. "Anything, Em. I'd do anything I had to do to get home to you. It wasn't your fault, Baby. It just was. You didn't set off those bombs, and you tried to save him, but you couldn't. You couldn't save him and save yourself. And if you'd fallen, both you and this baby inside you would have died, Emily."

I want to pull him fully on top of me, to feel his skin pressed against mine, because that's what we do to heal each other, but his weight on my stomach would be uncomfortable. And I can't imagine not touching him and not being able to look in his eyes.

His thoughts are keeping pace with mine, because he pulls me up and settles me on his lap again, my legs around his waist. I crush him to me, my fingers pressing into the skin of his back, his head buried against my neck and my lips on his head.

Technically, intercourse hasn't been forbidden by my doctor. She says both my cervix and uterus look great, and just to take it easy. Still, I've used the fragility of this pregnancy to hold Derek at arm's length since the night I told him I was pregnant. I want nothing more than to be as close as possible to him now, though. We both need this.

I place my hand on his cheek and raise his head off my shoulder. I kiss him like I haven't kissed him since my birthday. I feel his grip on me loosen and feel his fingers run lightly over my shoulders and to my neck, holding my lips against his, our tongues meeting and our sighs mingling with each other.

I unwrap my legs from around him adjust my body slightly.

"Em," he murmurs against my lips. "Is this okay?"

"Perfect," I sigh as I lift and then sink down on him in one slow, fluid motion.

We stay still like that for several seconds, our chests pressed together and our hearts fluttering against each other. I crush him in another hug and he sobs and buries his face in my neck again. "There you are, Emily," he breathes out when he calms down. "I thought I was going to lose you."

I kiss his cheek. "Thank you. Thank you for knowing how to find me," I whisper in his ear.


	16. Chapter 16

Emily's no longer exercising at night, and no longer using my body as an exercise apparatus, but I've caught her a few times in the middle of the night when she's escaped from our bed. I've found her in the den, fingering the fake IDs that Gil made for her. Like even though she said disappearing wasn't what she wanted, she's contemplating it now that she's actually trying to deal with what happened in October.

She's also taken to wearing a pair of my flannel pajama bottoms and one of my t-shirts to bed at night. She has an expansive maternity wardrobe from when she was pregnant with Rory, and that wardrobe includes a couple of nightgowns, but they've yet to make an appearance this time around. Perhaps Emily's deemed them too summery, since she was pregnant with Rory and needing maternity clothes in the spring and summer. Maybe those soft, sleeveless nightgowns are too chilly for January. Still, the inside temperature of our home doesn't really fluctuate much, summer or winter, so I think maybe there's another reason.

I haven't asked her why. I haven't told her that I miss those flowing nightgowns that I purchased for her, and how she looked wearing them when she was pregnant before. I haven't told her that one of my favorite memories of her previous pregnancy was the first night she put one of them on, took in the look on my face, laughed quietly and then bunched the material that rested against her thighs to her waist, straddled my hips and kissed me, still chuckling.

I search for the softness in her eyes and body that I used to know while she lays in bed in my nightclothes, a book in her lap, her back propped up against pillows, reading glasses perched on her nose and her hair typically pulled back.

She's come back to me a lot since the week before Christmas, since she finally told me the story about letting that little boy go in order to save herself. The stiffness is gone when I crawl into bed beside her and wrap my arms around her. Instead of her back going rigid, she cries now. She cries in my arms, and I understand it's a grieving process, tears that she'd held back for months.

I hold her and tell her I love her and let her cry, and eventually she tires, her puffy eyes drifting shut. I wipe the tears from her cheeks and kiss her damp eyelashes and wonder when it's going to end, when there's going to come the day that tears aren't part of her nightly routine.

"It's pregnancy hormones," she sometimes tells me. And maybe that's true. But it's also a deep, guilt-laden sadness that she just has to work through.

At least she's working through it with me now, instead of pushing me away.

Her body is changing faster this time around. At twenty weeks pregnant, she looks far larger than she did the last time. I cringe, thinking about the size of our son and how she's going to have to deliver him. Rory was relatively small, and that was difficult enough for her.

I can feel the baby kicking, which is also different; I didn't feel Rory until Emily was about twenty-one weeks pregnant. But I started feeling this baby move around inside Emily at a little over eighteen weeks, on New Year's Eve. His most active time seems to be at night, right after Emily has mellowed and fallen asleep after one of her crying spells. Almost like he's saying, "Hey, wake up. Remember something good, Mommy."

I have Emily's slightly pinker cheeks that remind me of her last pregnancy, and her slightly rounder face. I have the gentle curves of her body, and her relaxed frame sleeping beside me in bed every night. In that way, it's similar. But I don't have those nightgowns, which are right there in her drawer, washed and ready to go. And it's not the same type of softness in her disposition as it was the last time. This softness is more emotional exhaustion and less happiness. I'm wondering when the genuine happiness that can carry her not just through the day, but through our nights in bed as well, will come back.

Back in December, after I got home from LA, when the truth was out there, I took in the things I hadn't been paying attention to while I was so focused on what was going on with Emily. Things like the fact that after dinner together in the main house, Chris and my mother would often retire for the evening together, either in her apartment or his cabin. Sometimes they went their separate ways, because I imagine after decades of being alone, they still craved their own space. But more often than not, only one of our subproperties would have lights on in the evenings.

One night, after I tucked Leon into bed, I glanced out his window and saw the shadow of my mother and Chris dancing in the living room of her apartment, the gentle strums of music barely audible between our two living spaces.

"Does it bother you?" my mother asked me one day right around Christmas.

I shook my head immediately and she raised her eyebrows at me, knowing I wasn't being completely honest. The truth was, I'd considered Chris a good man who was on borrowed time from the day I met him, and he'd borrowed a lot of days since then - over two years.

"I'm worried you're going to get attached to him and he's going to die," I responded to her questioning gaze.

"We're both in our seventies. We're both going to die at some point, Derek. And I'm already attached to him. He makes me laugh. He does sweet things for me that make me smile. He's okay with me being a bed hog."

I cringed inwardly at those words, not particularly wanting that mental image, and my mother laughed. "Shit happens," said the woman who I'd rarely heard swear my entire life. "And good things happen," she continued. "It's our right in life to choose to let in the good for however long we can."

I looked at her, wondering how she could be so seemingly blase about her ordeal in October. "Emily had to let go of the baby in that house in order to save herself," I found myself whispering, just wanting to process it.

My compassionate mother teared up immediately. "If she did that, she didn't have a choice."

"I know," I said. "She didn't."

"You've made difficult decisions in the course of your career, where something or even someone was sacrificed for the greater good. You both have," she said while she wiped her eyes.

"I know. But never a baby, never like that," I whispered. "And she's so sad."

My mom nodded. "She's smiling more now, though. It's getting better. Count her smiles, Derek. Hold onto them. She saved me, and she saved herself and we're all still here. She's forty-seven years old and pregnant. She's probably scared about that, too. She's not talking to me like she used to, but she's smiling more. Give it time. She'll come back to us. How could she not?"

After that, I started counting Emily's smiles more during the day, and they were there. And her laughter was as well. At night, she might be letting loose a river of tears with me, but she was coming back to us during the day.

Counting her smiles made me realize the smiles that were missing in our house, and those were Leon's. He was more apprehensive about life now.

I set off to get to the root of what was on his mind. I spent a lot of one on one time with him on the weekends, sledding now that we finally had snow, having him help split firewood from an old tree that we had cut down in November, playing board games with him. He was tight-lipped for several days, and I finally just started throwing out guesses to see if he would take the bait.

"Are you worried because Mama is having a boy?" I asked today, trying to reach for any viable explanation that would get him talking. "You'll always be our son, you know. There will just be two sons in the household come spring. One will be a baby, and the other will be you. You'll always be our Leon, our first and oldest son, and we will always love you."

He stared at me, his cheeks red in the cold, a knit cap my mother made him for Christmas on his head, his arms laden with firewood, and his wide eyes filling with tears.

"I'm not worried about having a brother," he whispered, his lips quivering.

"Then what is it?" I asked while I busied myself with another stump of wood to cut so he didn't feel like I was staring at him.

I watched from the corner of my eyes as he trudged through the snow towards the back porch, walked up the steps and carefully stacked the wood in our pile there. I heard his feet coming back towards me a few minutes later. He stood to the side of me, outside of the circle I'd drawn in the snow to keep him outside of the area where my ax would be swinging.

"Mama cries a lot at night after I'm in bed. I've heard her. Why does she?" he asked tentatively.

I contemplated my response. "It was hard for her, going to try and find Nana, thinking you and Rory had almost been taken, asking you to lie about her being with us when she really wasn't."

"But she did find Nana?" he asked.

That had been a sticking point on a few occasions. We'd hedged around his questions about just how Emily had come back saying she hadn't found my mom, and then my mom appearing in a hospital a few hours later. We knew Leon needed to process things, but were afraid that telling him the truth would be asking him to hold more lies than he could handle on the shoulders of his slight body and sweet soul.

I stilled the motion of the ax in my hand, my shoulders burning and my body feeling good with the physical exertion. I turned to look at Leon, who was several inches taller than he was when we first brought him home, but still a couple years away from puberty. He was gangly; he was a lot like I was a few months shy of ten. His blue eyes stared at me, like he was searching for something.

It dawned on me in that moment that I was just about the same age as he was when my father was shot right in front of me and died in my arms. There was no escaping that reality, that truth. But I tried, I tried for my mother. I put masks up and pretended I was okay. And it lead me to no place good - just more secrets and lies.

"Yes. Mama found Nana and rescued her," I said to him, telling him the truth finally. "But she had to do a lot of things she wasn't really allowed to do anymore because she didn't work for Interpol or the FBI. And we didn't want to burden you with having to tell more lies."

Leon sank into the snow on his bottom. He drew his knees up to his chest and rested his chin on them, looking at me. "I knew she would. I knew she must have. She saved me."

I went and knelt before him, my denim-clad knees sinking into the snow. "Is that what you needed to know? That we would have saved you if you had been taken again?"

He shook his head, his eyes filled with tears that overflowed and dripped down his cheeks. "I know that. It's just that, if something like what happened in October happened again, and Rory and a new baby were both in the house, how would I ever carry both of them out of there? I couldn't," he sobbed.

It was in that moment that I truly contemplated the bag that was on the highest shelf in our den. A bag with cash in it, and new IDs for all of us. IDs I'd caught Emily fingering on a few occasions.

I couldn't tell Leon that nothing like that would ever happen again. The odds were slim, just because there was only so much evil in the world and it couldn't all be directed at a single family, but it wasn't impossible.

"You were so smart," I told him. "You were so strong, and we are so proud of you and thankful for you."

He nodded; we'd told him that countless times in the past couple of months.

"But that's _our_ job, Leon," I continued. "It's our job to make sure things are safe enough so you don't have to worry about that. That's why our home alarms are better now. That's why we cut back a lot of our bushes and trees, so people can see what's going on in here from the street. I don't think anything like that will happen again, but if it does, I think you'll be just as strong and brave."

He looked at me. And looked. His wet eyes blinking at me, absorbing my words. And my heart was breaking.

Maybe we needed to go, to truly disappear, just so he didn't have to worry about and strategize how he would ever get two younger siblings out of our home should someone try to take them again.

I stood up and reached my hand towards him. I pulled him into the safety circle in the snow and handed him the ax. I didn't think he'd necessarily be able to cut the wood, but it was dry and not impossible. I hoped it. I hoped he'd have success.

I found the driest stump we had. I demonstrated how to use the ax. He did a few practice swings and then I nodded and stepped out of the circle. When his ax struck the piece of wood and became embedded, Leon smiled. It was probably sheer luck, but I didn't care. It was a smile on his face like I hadn't seen in a long time.

"See," I told him. "You can't do anything."

And he grinned wider.

It was later that afternoon when I sought out my mother again, while Rory was napping, and Emily, who had tired of wearing my sweaters and sweatshirts, was out getting some more appropriate maternity clothes for a winter pregnancy; when Leon was at Chris's cabin learning the ropes of chess. I didn't skirt around the issue; I needed to know.

"If we disappeared with new identities, would you come with us?" I asked her.

She looked at me and then turned back towards the stove to stir the beef stew she was making for dinner. After several seconds, she nodded. "Yes. I couldn't imagine my life without Rory and Leon. But why would we do something like that?"

"So we could all feel safe," I responded softly.

She shook her head and then turned towards me. "Your father was a good man and I loved him with my whole heart. He walked with you to the corner market one day, it was that simple. I was baking cupcakes for a school fundraiser with your sisters. He kissed me goodbye before he left and told me he would bring me home a treat, and then he winked at me and said, 'I love you'. I felt safe. I didn't feel any fear in that moment. I loved my life. You both walked out the front door, you practically running, with change from your birthday money rattling in your pocket. You came home and your father didn't."

I wasn't aware that I had tears in my eyes until my mother's warm hand brushed them from my cheek. "You can go to the end of the earth with new names and all the money in the world, but life happens, Derek. We all have to live the best way we can and make the choices we have to. I was mad at your father for a long time for intervening, thinking he'd have come home if he'd just gotten down on his knees and said nothing. And maybe that's true, but he also could have been struck by a car the next day. We never know and there are no guarantees. I had to learn that over the course of too many years, while you were suffering and your sisters moved emotionally away from me and I didn't have it in me to see it. That doesn't have to be Emily. She has someone who can make her remember, and he's standing right in front of me."

Her words rang in my ears all afternoon. They rang in my ears throughout dinner where Leon smiled a little more and told the story about using the ax for the first me. Rory was all giggles in her high chair while she attempted to use her little toddler fork with her right hand and ended up shoveling most of the food on her tray into her mouth with her left. My mother and Chris sat next to each other, and by the looks of their shoulder movements, they frequently held hands under the table. Her words were there when I kissed and tucked our children into bed tonight.

My head is spinning now in our quiet home. I brush my teeth and wash my face and hope that Emily maybe bought some maternity pajamas that are more appropriate for winter while she was out today, but when I open the bathroom door, she's there in the bed. Book in her lap. Hair pulled back in a sloppy, endearing bun. Purple reading glasses perched on her nose. And wearing an old Northwestern t-shirt of mine and a pair of my navy blue and green plaid pajama pants.

She smiles a little when she sees me, and puts her book aside. And just like every other night since I came home from LA and she told me down to minute details how she let go of that little boy in her hands and managed to swing her leg up onto a ledge of wood still standing in that house in England, I crawl in bed beside her and wrap her in my arms. And she she rests her head on my shoulder and sighs, and then the tears start.

It's like everything she's held in all day while pretending everything is normal comes crashing over her.

I hold her, but I don't just whisper hollow words of love.

"You forgot," I say, and she stills in my arms.

"What?" she asks.

This is the first true exchange of words that have happened on her nightly vigils of grief and guilt.

"Over two years ago, I told you what it was like for me so many years, knowing that not talking about what Carl Buford did to me lead to other kids being abused like I was. And you told me that we all just make the best decisions we possibly can with the deck of cards we're dealt. And that I did what I needed to do in order to survive, and there was no shame in that. You kissed my chest and my face and told me you loved me and that there was nothing in my behavior that was shameful. You told me I had to believe that in order to truly move forward."

Her heart is fluttering like a hummingbird's wings as her chest presses against my side and her arms tighten around me. She's silent for over a minute, and I kiss the top of her head, right on one of the gray hairs that are starting to sprout here and there, but not so significantly that she's resorted to dyeing yet. I don't care if she never does.

"Do you remember saying that?" I whisper.

"Yes," she finally breathes out against my chest.

"I know you're laying here thinking that it's not the same type of scenario, but it is. You thanked me over a month ago, for knowing how to find you. And I did, partially, that night. But I stopped a little short of truly finding you, afraid of saying anything while you've cried night after night, because I was so scared you'd close yourself off from me again. But finding you comes not just in acknowledging what you had to do in order to get home to us. It's in making you talk about it. Just like I finally got Leon to talk about what was bothering him today."

She raises her head up to look in my eyes, and I smile softly at her. I tell her word-for-word about my exchange with Leon. And then I tell her about my conversation with my mother.

"I know sometimes at night, you've been contemplating disappearing without wanting to say it, just to have a fresh start where you think you wouldn't have to work through everything that happened in England. We could go, Em. We could disappear, and if that's what you want to do, just say the word. But my mother made me remember that you can't run away from life. What's going to happen is going to happen."

I take a deep breath and smile sadly before continuing. "My father pushed me behind him when two men with guns barged into the little market near our house. He protected me on an outing that was supposed to be joyful, when all I wanted was to buy a Snickers and a cap gun with my birthday money. He had my mom's favorite ice cream in his hand, and he pushed me behind him with his other. And he was murdered when he tried to intervene. There was no stopping it, and there would be no stopping something like that if we stayed here, or we moved to Siberia. Life happens everywhere, and it's not always pleasant. Different identities and a fresh start guarantee nothing. We can only live and remember the good."

Her tears have dried up, but she hasn't stopped staring at me, her mouth partially open, her cheeks slightly pink, smelling like toothpaste and the lavender soap she uses.

I brush my fingers down her cheek. "We have to move forward, Em. We have to keep going. We have to really start living again without it being you pretending the best you can to be who you always were, and then falling apart in my arms every night. This is our home and our life and it's going to be a damned good one, even when shitty things beyond our control happen. We can make it."

She sinks her head back down on my shoulder and is silent, but still there are no more tears. She runs her fingers down my chest. "We went through hell together, and all I wanted was perfection when it was over. And we got that, and then it was gone. And I forgot to trust your love when things weren't perfect."

"Perfect doesn't happen in life. It might last for awhile, but it's not infinite, for anyone. What we have is really damned good, Em. You're an amazing, caring person, and you did the best you could given the situation, and I'm so grateful for you coming home and my mother being here. But we have to really move forward. That means getting through the sadness, and going through the rest of the process, even if it's anger and denial. But we can't be suspended in limbo forever. You're halfway through this pregnancy, and there's going to be a new baby here in just a handful of months. And I think he's trying to remind you of that, because when you cry and then finally fall asleep, he kicks up a storm."

I feel her breath wash across my chest in a huff of a laugh. "He's going to be a football player, like his Daddy." She pauses and then laughs again. "Or maybe a soccer player."

I laugh, because I have a deep aversion to the game of soccer, which I find boring, and she knows it. I press my lips more firmly to her head and smile against the warm of her scalp. "Or a soccer player," I respond. "Why don't you wear your maternity pajamas, Emily?" I ask quietly.

I feel her shrug her shoulders. "They haven't felt very much like me."

"OK," I breathe.

She lifts her head again and raises her eyebrows. "You've wanted me to wear them?" she asks.

I answer her with a small nod. "But it's okay. I like this look, too."

She shakes her head at me and smiles. My eyes track her body as she rolls away from me, gets out of bed and walks towards her dresser. I watch her with rapt longing as she flings my Northwestern t-shirt off and slides the flannel pants down her legs. I'd take her just like that, with her bikini panties that rest delicately below the swell of her stomach and nothing else, but when she pulls out one of those nightgowns - the light blue one - and slips it over her head and it settles over her body and the curve of her belly, I'm nearly breathless.

There's that soft vision of her again, the one that radiates contentment, the one that I felt might be lost forever. It's not like the nightgown is magic, but maybe the look on my face is. Because she stares at me and then she laughs lightly, sweetly, and shakes her head at me again.

"I forgot to remember that we're best when we're freely talking with each other, no matter what it is that needs to be said. I'm sorry," she says as she walks back towards me.

"It's okay. I kind of forgot myself. We had decades of hiding from our truths and only small bit of time where we were sharing everything with each other" I say, feeling better than I have in months as she slides the hem of the nightgown up her thighs and straddles my hips.

"This is what you've wanted?" she asks as she leans forward to kiss me, and I feel the swell of our baby press into my abdomen.

I nod. "Do you remember what it was like when you were pregnant with Rory?"

"Yes, but that Emily has felt very far away from me for the past few months, and it's exhausting trying to find her."

I run my fingers over the soft skin of her thighs. "She's right here, Em."

"I think maybe she is," she whispers as she kisses me.

I don't sleep much that night. She sleeps beside me and the puffy eyes are absent, and she looks almost content. Her soft shoulder peeks out of the nightgown and I graze my fingers over it.

We're not going anywhere physically. And she's going to really come back to us emotionally, and we are going to find our stride again, truly find it, even if it looks a little different. But maybe there's something we can do, something to make us feel a little more secure than the top-of-the-line system Central Security Group can provide us.

I'm thinking about a home Emily described for me, with a safe room and other bells and whistles you don't get with your average security company. I'm searching for a middle ground - staying here, but with tangible safety measures that can make both Emily and Leon feel more secure.

It's four o'clock in the morning when I creep out of bed and grab Emily's phone. I make my way downstairs and scroll through her contacts and call Gil. He says he can give us something better than what we have, something that provides us with a measure of security that goes beyond the norm, instead of six fake IDs that we're never going to use.

And when Emily wakes up a little after six o'clock in the morning when she hears Rory babbling over the baby monitor, I touch her cheek and she smiles at me. "Gil's coming," I tell her.

* * *

 _A/N - It's been a hellish couple of weeks for me. My dad's been having serious health issues again, and there was a huge falling out with my crazy ass mother. I think my next writing endeavor might just be a guidebook called "How to Divorce Your Crazy Mom (When She Lives a Mile Away From You) Without Going Insane."_

So that's the difficult part, and the reason behind this chapter's delay.

Onward and upward!

 _THANK YOU all for the Profiler's Choice Award nominations! You are amazing and getting that notification made my day. Actually, it made quite a few of my days. If you're so inclined and have a fanfiction account, please go vote! Here is a message from the organizers:_

The 2015 Profiler's Choice Awards are on! Calling all CM readers and Authors! Join us for the final round in our annual Profiler's Choice CM Awards; help us choose the best of the best Criminal Minds fanfiction and let your voice be heard. Check out the final ballot and rules at the Profilers choice Awards 2015 Forum. All rules and information can be found there. Voting ends February 29, 2016.

 _You all are the best. I adore my readers. :)_


	17. Chapter 17

_A/N - Each chapter is taking me so long with my crazy life right now, but I won't give up on this story. Thanks for hanging in there!_

* * *

We _did_ allow ourselves to get too complacent, with routines that were predictable. Our weeks rarely wavered. Leon would walk to and from school with the neighborhood kids. In the summer, Derek and I would run in the mornings before heading to work. On Mondays, Fran went to play bingo, and on Thursday evenings she volunteered at her church's soup kitchen. The typical Saturday involved any combination of the team and a few neighbors coming around for dinner. On many Sundays, my father and Fran ate dinner in her apartment or his cabin, and my mother would join us for dinner.

And on Wednesday evenings, Derek and I had our date night out. That my birthday fell on a Wednesday this past October was pure coincidence. People surveilled us and anyone with the time and desire could have figured out that we wouldn't be home on a Wednesday evening.

For five days and nights after Derek told me that he'd called Gil, but before he arrived, I started taking inventory of my life again, and Derek slowly started taking inventory of me, in a way he hadn't since I'd gotten back from London. I realized that I could go hours during the day without thinking about that cottage on the border of Scotland, and that when I did think about it, it didn't hurt as much as it did before.

Derek found peace in my softness and nights without tears, and I found mine with the stubble on his cheeks tickling my palms at night. With letting him love me, reminding me with the feather light touches of his fingertips on my skin and his lips whispering against me that he was still there for me, that he still loved me just as much as he had before, that an extra measure of security was coming, and we could once again put ourselves back together.

Gil came to us on the wings of a plane that used to belong to Adrian Stancu that he's now commandeered as his own. He came with a suitcase and two trunks that raised eyebrows. Gil called us, and we called Hotch, and Hotch intervened so Gil could leave the airfield with a cornucopia of electronic equipment.

I don't know what it was about seeing him. Perhaps it was because of his connection to Clyde, or perhaps it was just because he was a kind man who had put himself on the line for me and Fran and my family, but when he walked in our door late that night, I wrapped my arms around him and sobbed. "I let that baby go to save myself," I whispered with my chin resting on his shoulder, while Derek looked on, concern and love on his face.

Gil's gray beard tickled my cheek. He squeezed me a little tighter, then moved his body away from me and kissed my forehead, "And I'm here to help make sure you're never in a position to have to make a decision like that again," he said.

He turned and stuck out his hand to introduce himself to Derek. Though it was after eleven, we made tea. The three of us sat around our kitchen table in somewhat awkward silence.

"How's Holly?" I asked him finally.

"Better. Nick's staying at my place with her while I'm here. They've become very good friends. In a strange way, it's like they need each other in order for both of them to move forward in life. Nick comes around a lot. He's writing again. He'd take Holly back with him, but we don't think she's ready for the city just yet. I don't think she'll ever tell about how she escaped her hell, she's just happy to be out of it."

I nodded and smiled slightly at that. "Adrian Stancu's dead," I said.

Gil nodded and sipped his tea. "So I heard."

I raised one eyebrow at him and he glanced away from me and then looked back. He nodded once, briefly, acknowledging that he'd made sure Adrian died. And that was that.

"So what are your plans for this house?" Derek asked to change the subject, his hand resting warmly on my thigh under the table.

Gil looked around and then towards the stairs. "A guard dog...or four," he said with a wink.

"What?" Derek asked, perplexed.

Gil laughed. "You'll see in the morning."

We retired to bed after that, Derek and I going upstairs after getting Gil settled in the den. I changed into one of those nightgowns Derek seemed to love so much, and I laid with my head on his shoulder.

"He's different," Derek murmured against my hair.

I smiled against his chest. "He is. But he's a good man. I think this is strange for him, being in a home like this. He's used to solitude."

"What do you think he meant by guard dogs?" Derek asked.

I laughed lightly. "I don't know. But I'm sure we'll find out soon. Thank you for calling him."

Derek's fingers stroked my arm in a soothing pattern, and I found myself lulled to the edge of sleep by his touch. But then he spoke again. "You miss Clyde."

I lifted my head to look at him. I nodded. "I do."

"I'm sorry, Em. It was all my fault. If Daniels hadn't taken me, none of it would have happened."

My eyebrows raised impossibly high, though I wasn't sure he could see them in the relative darkness of our bedroom. I leaned forward and kissed his cheeks, his eyes, his forehead, and finally his lips. "We've been down that road, Derek. Clyde was dying. He'd be gone from my life by now either way. And if you hadn't been taken, there were be no Leon or Rory or a baby on the way. My father would probably have died by now had we not found him and he was still drinking. And there would be no us."

His arm squeezed me. "I love us."

I kissed him again and whispered, "Me too." And I let his fingers on my skin soothe me to sleep.

The next morning, Gil did indeed produce our "guard dogs." They were robotic dogs I'd seen in the stores around Christmas time, but Gil had tinkered with them to the point that they in no way resembled a child's toy. He patted Leon's head and told him he'd have to be patient to see what the dogs could do, that it wouldn't be time to fully program them for awhile.

He stayed for three weeks. He talked with Fran and my father, and seemed to get a kick out of chasing Rory around the house, hoisting her up and laughing as she squealed and grabbed onto his beard. But mostly he was all business, with Derek's help on the evenings and and weekends if he asked for it, and the rest of us pitching in when necessary. We trusted him. Derek had told him he didn't want the house to feel like Fort Knox, and Gil assured him it wouldn't.

The first thing he did was to rip away the sheetrock in our upstairs hallway, where the wall butted up to our stairs. After a few trips to the store, and one trip to "someone he knew," he had the supplies necessary to install a steel sliding door that, once painted, looked no more like a pocket door at the top of stairs - unless you looked closely. That project took him a week.

He spent several days outside on our property, messing with our motion sensors and installing more equipment. And then he was at our alarm panels, playing with the wires, and putting a few cameras in the house.

He seemed to want to work in solitude for the most part, and didn't say much about what he was doing. He joined us for meals, and seemed to listen more than interject words into conversation. It was sometimes difficult for me to understand how a quiet, understated man like Gil had ever maintained a friendship with Clyde, or how he could have possibly chosen his career path in life.

As Leon's tenth birthday approached, Gil told me he just needed a few more days. I was sitting at the kitchen table looking at a magazine while he was doing whatever it was he was doing with the alarm panel downstairs.

I glanced up at him when he spoke, a surprising sense of loss settling over me when I thought about him leaving.

He didn't glance my way, but I saw him take a deep breath and exhale slowly. "In 1989, Clyde and I were on special detail in Afghanistan. He was strong and quick and his mind worked faster than any mind I'd ever seen before or now. He was the best friend I'd ever had, or ever would have. And we were on a dangerous assignment. Surveillance equipment wasn't what is is now back then, not by a long shot, as I'm sure you can imagine. I was supposed to be his eyes inside a building where we were trying to track down a group of men. We zeroed in their location in a large house. We observed for a few days. We weren't there to make arrests. We were twenty-four years old and we shouldn't have been in that position, but we were the best."

I rested my chin in my hand, elbow on our table, and listened intently. Clyde rarely talked about his days with the Royal Marines, only hinting that he and Markus Klaus were not part of a regular unit, that their assignments were more undercover. He never had mentioned Gil. "Was Markus there?" I asked.

Gil shook his head. "He should have been. But he was sick at the time, and we had someone else with us. His name was Alex. He was twenty years old, good but fresh when it came to things like this. It was the three of us and what we thought were four men that we were supposed to assassinate. We thought it would be a piece of cake, and if we'd had Markus, it might have gone differently. I'm going to make a long story short here, because I want to get to my point. I stayed in our car, making sure no one came in or out. And Clyde and Alex went in. And then all hell broke loose. We'd watched that house for days and had never seen anyone besides those four men, no evidence whatsoever that anyone else was in that house. But there were. Eight women and fourteen children. Young kids. When I saw them on Clyde's camera, I bolted from the car and ran inside to help."

Gil cleared his throat and turned to face me finally. "The women took up guns when the men fell, and Clyde and Alex and I picked them off one by one, in front of their children. And then the oldest child, he was maybe twelve, produced a grenade. He threw it at us, and we ran. The explosion came when we were safely out the door. Alex had taken a bullet in his thigh and couldn't help. We should have gotten the hell out of there, we should have wrapped Alex's leg to stop the bleeding, but Clyde screamed at me that we needed to see if there were any children still alive. All I remember thinking was what the hell we were going to do with a bunch of children when no one was supposed to know we were there. And I knew we only had minutes to escape before authorities arrived. But Clyde ran back into the house and I followed him. They were all either already dead or on fire. Except one. A baby who had been in a different room. I still remember the look on Clyde's face, the tears in his eyes, when he came towards me with a crying baby in his arms."

I blinked back tears and smiled softly at Gil. I nodded at him to go on.

"Alex was dead when we got back outside. The bullet had hit an artery, and we'd gone back into the house instead of wrapping his leg. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered. But I grabbed his body because we couldn't leave him behind, and Clyde carried the baby and we got out of there just in time. We drove around for a long time, Alex dead in the back seat, and the baby in Clyde's arms in the passenger seat next to me. The baby stopped crying. She was just staring at Clyde. 'No one can know we did this,' he whispered to me. I think I was in moderate shock about the whole thing. I told him we needed to report back in. He nodded and we found a small house in a relatively safe area of the city. We left the baby on the porch, knocked until we saw a light come on, and then got the hell out of there. We never told anyone about the baby, or that we'd left Alex to bleed out so we could go back in that house. But that night changed us. Clyde went to SIS, and I went back to the estate my grandparent's had left me. I became hell bent on creating better surveillance equipment so that good men like Clyde would never be blindsided in a situation like that again."

Gil stepped forward at that point and brushed the single tear on my cheek away gently. "When Clyde came to me to give me all of his medals and awards and told me he was dying, he also told me that that baby's name was Asma. That the family in the house where we left her had taken her in. That he'd kept track of her and seen to it that she never wanted for anything, and when Afghanistan got too dangerous, Clyde got her and her family out of there and got them resettled in the UK. She's a doctor now. Clyde anonymously paid for her schooling."

"Markus says he hasn't seen you in decades," I managed to say after I'd absorbed the story for a couple of minutes.

"No. Clyde and I shared something that night that kept him close to me. But Markus has always been a straight shooter, literally and figuratively. He'd never have a need for my services and anonymity has been my mainstay."

Gil's squeeze on my shoulder was full of warmth and kindness. "People like us, we have to make judgement calls all of the time that we'd rather not make, and there's no clear definition of right or wrong. It just is. We can try to go back and spin our wheels at finding a different outcome, but that gets us nowhere. We have to keep on living and going forward when it's over, Emily. And I get the feeling you haven't done much actual living like you used to since October."

I shook my head in confirmation. For as far as I'd come in the couple of months since Christmas, I was still mostly sitting sentry in our home day in and day out, and everyone else was following my lead. Fran hadn't been out much at all, Derek and I hadn't been out together, and Leon played with his friends after school at our house, instead of at theirs.

"I think this is why Clyde made me promise to never go undercover again. I never could recover like he seemed to be able to. And then I went after Fran and broke that promise," I whispered.

"And he would have been right there next to you if he was still alive. We have to break promises sometimes for the greater good. Just like I promised him I'd never tell anyone about that night in Afghanistan, and I just did," Gil said with a slight smile.

I smiled back and looked down at the table, like the grains of wood would help me find something to say.

"Are you having a birthday party for Leon?" Gil asked me, the abrupt change in topic jolting me from my thoughts.

I nodded. "Yes. But just family and the BAU team."

Gil shook his head at me. "Ten's a big year. Invite everyone that comes into this house regularly - his friends and their parents. I'm about done here. I can help you prepare."

I raised my eyebrows but agreed to his plan.

XXXXXXX

Leon thoroughly enjoyed his birthday party a few days later, and our house was filled with friends and family and laughter for the first time in a long time. It was bitingly cold outside, snowing and the wind howling, but Leon's cheeks were flushed in our warm home, a smile lighting his face and a look of wonder in his eyes the whole time. Like he wasn't expecting to find normal again, but there we all were. Still normal, and loving and strong.

After the neighbors cleared out, it was just us, the BAU, and Gil. And that's when GIL brought out one of the robotic dogs. "Give me a couple of minutes," he said, while we all stared on curiously. He powered up the dog, and fiddled with his laptop for a minute and then looked up. "OK," he said. "I need everyone to take turns saying their names. This way the system will recognize your voices as people who can activate it."

We dutifully did as told and Gil nodded. He went back to his computer then looked up and winked at Leon. "Fran and Chris, can you go stand in the living room? Penelope, you go into the den. And Leon, you tell the dog you're home," Gil said.

Leon looked at him doubtfully while everyone moved, but then grinned in interest and said, "I"m home."

The robotic dog raised its head. "Hello, Leon. Welcome home. Your alarm is currently off. Fran and Chris are in the living room, Rory is in her bedroom, and Penelope is in the den. Would you like me to arm the alarm for you?"

Leon's eyes nearly popped out of his head, and his grin widened. "Yes," he said.

A few beeps could be heard from the panel in the kitchen and the panel upstairs. "Doors and windows are armed and the motion sensors and cameras are on," came from the dog.

We all watched in stunned silence that only got more amazing when the dog lifted his plastic head and stated, "Rick is coming up the driveway."

We watched Gil pull a cell phone out of his pocket. "He probably got home and realized he was missing this. The cameras scanned everyone's faces today. All the dogs will be programmed to let you know if someone enters the premises, and let you know if it's someone you don't know. I'll teach you how to program it on your own to add more people, but I think the majority of people who regularly come here were at the party today. No one you don't know will get near this house without you knowing about it first."

There was a knock on the door. Gil said, "Disarm," and there were more beeps and then Derek opened the front door. Rick explained he'd left his cell phone, Derek handed it to him, and he left to go next door again. "Rick has left the premises," the dog said a few seconds later.

"Damn," said Penelope said in awe from the doorway of the den. We all laughed lightly, and Gil looked almost shy.

"I wanted to keep it friendly for the children, so I thought the dogs. Fran can have one in her apartment, and Chris can take one, and you can keep one downstairs and one upstairs. You can also arm the alarm without them. And if you tell them to stand down, the dogs won't say anything until you tell them to wake up. In case you want them quiet when other people are around. The system connects to your cell phones, so when you're out, you can get notifications of the comings and goings here."

Reid reached over and touched the dog and Leon stepped forward to hug Gil. "There's more," Gil said over Leon's shoulder.

And he went on to explain that the steel door at the top of our stairs could be shut with a voice command. That if we ever needed to seal ourselves upstairs, we could. That the cameras he'd installed around the property were on a separate feed than the two cameras we had from the alarm company. That our alarm still functioned the same as before, and everything he added worked independent of that.

When everyone cleared out of the house shortly after that, with handshakes for Gil, I watched Leon carry his dog upstairs to his room. And later that night, after I tucked him in, I heard him talking to the dog.

"Where's Nana?" he asked.

"Fran is in her apartment," the robotic voice of the dog said.

"Where's Grandpa?"

"Chris is in Fran's apartment," the dog replied.

And Leon giggled happily. "Good," he said.

Derek came up the stairs at that moment and saw me standing there, leaning against the wall outside Leon's bedroom. I put my finger to my lips and he stopped. I inclined my head towards our bedroom, and he headed in there with me quietly following him.

"Gil's unbelievable," he said as he pulled off his shirt to get ready for bed.

I nodded and sat on the edge of the bed, my protruding stomach resting against my thighs, our son doing a dance inside me. I looked at Derek's body as he removed his jeans, his sculpted muscles stretching and pulling as he moved. He never ceased to take my breath away, as long as I was giving myself time and permission to look.

No matter how much better things had gotten in the past few weeks, we were still dancing tentatively around each other in a lot of ways, and I was tired of it. It was time to move forward. I'd broken my promise to Clyde and done what I needed to do, and I'd gotten myself too stuck in my own head to let his voice register inside me. But Gil reminded me that Clyde would have been right there with me when I went after Fran if he could have been. And he would have told me I did the best I could, just like JJ had told me and Derek had told me. And I needed to forgive myself and start living again.

My eyes traveled up Derek's body and met his; he was looking at me curiously. I smiled at him before I spoke, "I think your mom should go play bingo on Monday. Or maybe on Tuesday. I think we shouldn't become too routine oriented, but we really need to get our lives back. Maybe my dad can go with her and get off this property. And I think we need to plan a date night. Just you and me. Maybe next Friday?"

You would have thought I'd just handed him a winning lottery ticket the way his face lit up. And maybe I had. He stepped towards me in his boxer briefs, his face lighting up the room. When he reached me, he placed his hand on my cheek. "I'd love a date night," he whispered.

XXXXXX

It's been over three hours since Derek first touched my cheek and told me with his hand and eyes and words that he'd been longing for a date night with me. After he locked our bedroom door and divested me of my clothing, we made love for the first time in months without desperation and sadness or anything but love and happiness in our hearts.

He sleeps peacefully next to me now, our bedroom door open again, our pajamas on, his mouth relaxed and slightly open. He looks a lot like Rory in his sleep. Or Rory looks a lot like him - soft and relaxed and completely in tune with the happiness in life. He sleeps like a child, and my heart thunders in my chest, so in love with him.

I'm not sure what woke me exactly, because I drifted off to sleep at nearly the same time as him hours before, but after I take my fill of his face in the dim light filtering in from the moon into our bedroom window, I glance at the clock.

It's just after midnight.

The winter winds howl outside, and I'm safe in this house with Derek and Leon and Rory. And the baby in my stomach is kicking away again, drumming against me. I'm officially twenty-five weeks pregnant, and every day after today is just one more day towards viability, towards this baby making it.

I bury my head against Derek's chest and rest one hand against my stomach, and I finally start believing again in that moment. Believing in the miracles that Derek and I can create together, believing in our path in life, believing in the people who love me and have confidence in me and have told me time and again that I am good person.

I take Derek's hand and move it so it rests over my stomach and I feel him wake slightly. His hand presses more firmly against my stomach and his other arm tightens around my back. And I shake my head against his chest, my forehead rubbing against the soft cotton covering his skin. The tears come, but they aren't tears of remorse. They are tears of happiness that I haven't felt salt my face or lips in a long time.

"You're my promise I'll never break," I whisper against his heart, hoping he'll understand.

And he squeezes me tighter and I can feel the soft, happy laugh bubbling up from his chest. "There was something there, Emily. Something I couldn't place or recognize, but something, from the moment I first shook your hand in the briefing room at the BAU. We're right where we're supposed to be. And I love you in a way you can't even imagine when I say it. I always will."

And I finally feel completely worthy of him again, for the first time since my birthday.


End file.
